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Regehr/Roche: What Canada needs now is more robust, visionary diplomacy, not more military spending

Posted on April 5, 2025editor

Ernie Regehr and Douglas Roche are members of Canadian Pugwash Group
This article was published in The Hill Times, April 2, 2025

PDF version here: RegehrRocheHT_April7.2025

As the present front-runner in the election race, Mark Carney has a special responsibility to straightforwardly pledge support for a global recommitment to international cooperation based on respect for international law as the urgent security imperative for our time.

EDMONTON—In their election campaigns, Canadian political leaders are sidestepping the real issue of this country’s security by insisting that more military spending will guarantee our safety. But more arms have rarely—if ever—advanced durable peace. What we urgently need is more robust and visionary diplomacy.

According to the polls, Mark Carney could well be prime minister for the next four years. He needs to prepare Canadians now for what he would do in what he has called a “new economic and security relationship” with the United States. His economic agenda is coming into focus on the tariffs question. But, aside from promising to boost Canada’s military spending to two per cent of GDP by 2030, he has not spoken about the wide agenda for peace that sweeps far beyond military measures.

All the leading contenders in this election keep referring to increased military spending as a primary response to threats to our sovereignty and changing security conditions in the Arctic. As an effort to placate a mercurial American president, this is a fool’s errand and, more importantly, it ignores the true foundations on which durable global peace and security are built.

The call on Canada to rally around the old shibboleth “if you want peace, prepare for war” is persuasive only if you ignore what contemporary war most often produces. The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza tell the story. The one thing these wars have not brought is peace. In all those devastating conflicts, it is when the fighting finally stops that peace can begin to be built.

Of course, it should be acknowledged that the Canadian Armed Forces do face some equipment deficiencies and recruitment challenges, which is leading to important corrective measures. Reconsidering the F-35 fighter aircraft purchase and improvements to Arctic patrols and situation awareness in all domains, as well as emergency response capacity, make eminent sense to the extent they respond to Canadian-defined needs. But concentrating only on increased military spending ignores the funds and initiatives needed for equitable human development and peace-building at home and abroad.

Sadly, Canada has now abandoned peacekeeping. Furthermore, the diplomacy, peacebuilding, development, and climate action side of this country’s security ledger continues to be woefully under-funded. And the new calls for increased military spending, with no specific commitment to restoring peacekeeping, will further reduce our ability to be a significant player in the much wider agenda for peace.

The UN Agenda for Peace, the Canadian-inspired institution of UN peacekeeping, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, peacebuilding programs around the world, and the UN’s 2024 Pact for the Future all point a constructive way forward, and to the truth that if you want peace, you have to build it. But without exception, all those initiatives are grievously underfunded while global military arsenals are lavished at the rate of over $2.5-trillion each year.

When the Cold War ended, the major powers explored ways of meeting mutual security interests. Canada played key roles in fostering peacekeeping, the Landmines Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Responsibility to Protect, disarmament diplomacy, and by staying out of the Iraq war and declining to join the unworkable Strategic Defence Initiative of then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

Those Canadian initiatives and actions were concrete achievements that helped to build peace and a stronger world security order, and thus a stronger Canada—but all that has faded from our collective memory. At this hinge moment in world affairs, leaders need to detail their visions for our country once again becoming a strong diplomatic player in building the conditions for peace.

These four pillars of a reconstructed peace architecture need Canada’s support:

  • Equitable economic and social development built through more public and private financial support for the UN Sustainable Development Goals;
  • Measures to cut carbon emissions and drive investment towards sustainable energy to defend against catastrophic climate change and mitigate consequences;
  • Arms control to rehabilitate a failing infrastructure, challenge the U.S., Russia, and China to pursue mutual restraint, promote the“denuclearization” that U.S. President Donald Trump has advocated, and renew disarmament diplomacy and sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; and
  • Human rights protection—notably of the peoples of Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and other war-torn places—through international peace forces operating under international law and vigorous multilateral peace-building.

In the Pact for the Future, endorsed by virtually all world leaders, states have agreed to address the root causes of conflicts, and to accelerate commitments to human rights. This is where Canada needs to invest its diplomatic and soft-power strength. In doing the right thing, our nation will also be strengthened to meet the challenges coming our way from our erstwhile continental partner.

As the present front-runner in the election race, Carney has a special responsibility to straightforwardly pledge support for a global recommitment to international cooperation based on respect for international law as the urgent security imperative for our time.

___________

Ernie Regehr is the founding executive director of Project Ploughshares, and author of The Simons Foundation’s Arctic Security Briefing Papers.  Former Senator Douglas Roche is the author of Keep Hope Alive: Essays for a War-free World (Amazon).

The Hill Times

Thurlow: Dear prime minister, please address the nuclear threat to life on Earth

Posted on March 7, 2025editor

Setsuko Thurlow is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group

Dear prime minister, please address the nuclear threat to life on Earth: from a Hiroshima survivor

 

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,

As you prepare to leave office, allow me to appeal to you to address the defining crisis of human history: the nuclear threat to life on Earth. I last made this public appeal to you in 2020 to which you did not reply. But with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now set at 89 seconds to midnight, closer than ever, I owe it to the great cause to which I have dedicated my life—nuclear disarmament—to try again.

I am a survivor of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, a crime against humanity made possible in part by Canada’s crucial contributions to the Manhattan Project. What I saw, through a terrified and bereaved child’s eyes, was nothing less than the beginning of the end of the world. I have told the story of my miraculous escape from hell countless times because I have never lost hope in the capacity of humanity to save itself from the worst of its inventions.

In recent years, I played my part in a diplomatic breakthrough potentially signalling the end of the nuclear nightmare: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states—two-thirds of the United Nations—in 2017. Yet your government chose to stand on the wrong side of history, following the directives of both the Obama and Trump administrations for NATO states to refuse to participate in the TPNW talks in New York: the first time Canada has boycotted negotiations mandated by the UN General Assembly.

Photograph courtesy of Michael Chambers Setsuko Thurlow: ‘I am a survivor of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, a crime against humanity made possible in part by Canada’s crucial contributions to the Manhattan Project.’

I was honoured to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a network of activists and survivors inspired by the success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in the 1990s, a decade when Canada was admired as a champion of humanitarian disarmament, not least for its urging of major reforms to NATO’s nuclear policies.

The foreign minister from that inspiring time was Lloyd Axworthy, who has publicly appealed to you to sign the TPNW, as have former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and the late John Turner, the late and former Liberal foreign minister Bill Graham and former Liberal foreign minister John Manley, along with a Who’s Who list of former senior diplomats and ambassadors, as well as 74 per cent of Canadians in a 2021 poll.

This is the treaty that you described as “sort of useless” because it was not supported by the nuclear-weapon states and their junior military partners. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has already established a powerful new anti-nuclear norm and stigma, complementing and supplementing the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty Canada has always supported. But how much more “sort of useful” would the TPNW be if it found friends like Canada, finally willing to break the shackles of nuclear dependency?

Because of its path-breaking provisions on victim assistance and environmental remediation, the TPNW also offers Canada a way to belatedly make amends for its role in the atomic age: the mining of uranium on colonized Dene territory that paved the atomic highway to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Canada’s involvement and complicity in the agonizing epochs of nuclear testing, nuclear arms racing, and nuclear proliferation that followed.

In August 1998, members of the Dene community of Deline in the Northwest Territories travelled to Hiroshima to apologize for their unwitting part in the atomic atrocities. Is it not high time that the Canadian government issued such an apology, both to the survivors of the bombings and to the affected Dene? Such an apology, however, must be matched by action: and signing the TPNW should be top of the list.

I have lived in Canada for 70 of the 80 years of the atomic age, as tides of concern over nuclear weapons have ebbed and flowed. When your father was prime minister, he sought to “suffocate” the arms race, and bring the reign of nuclear terror to an end. I believe he would be dismayed at Canada’s loss of leadership on disarmament, but encouraged by the path to Global Zero opened by the TPNW.

Prime minister, I dearly wish I had the chance to discuss Canada’s participation in the worldwide nuclear weapons abolition movement with you five years ago, or before. I recently celebrated my 93rd birthday and am still recovering from a serious fall. But I am neither ready nor able to give up. And while you remain prime minister, every second still counts.

Sincerely,

Setsuko Thurlow
Toronto

A founder of the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition hiroshimadaycoalition.ca in Toronto, Setsuko Thurlow jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in 2017.

 

Littlewood/Lentzos: Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention

Posted on December 16, 2024editor

Jez Littlewood is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group

Pubished as the Arms Control Association, December 2024: here

By the end of this month, states-parties will be halfway through their latest attempt to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). This effort was launched in 2022 at the convention’s ninth review conference with the establishment of a working group to “identify, examine and develop specific and effective measures, including possible legally binding measures, and to make recommendations to strengthen and institutionalize the Convention in all its aspects.”

[…]

Substantial progress has been made in some areas, but beneath the surface is a broader conflict about the shape of arms control agreements generally. This raises a question about whether strengthening the BWC needs to follow the traditional model of legally binding multilateral agreements with declarations, inspections, investigations, and an international organization where consensus rules or whether states-parties can agree to a new model that allows states to opt in to the mechanisms with which they agree and opt out of any processes or new commitments they are unable to support.

Continue reading: here

Regehr/Roche: Canada should invest in diplomacy, instead of spending more on defence   

Posted on September 17, 2024editor

By Ernie Regehr and Douglas Roche

Originally published in The Globe and Mail September 17, 2024

Ernie Regehr was the founding executive director of Project Ploughshares. Douglas Roche was a senator and Canadian ambassador for disarmament. Both a members of Canadian Pugwash Group. 

Powerful voices are driving Canada toward meeting NATO’s arbitrary target of spending 2 per cent of GDP for defence, but this singular focus on military expansion is not the path to a secure and peaceful future. Instead, Canada needs to get off the defensive and launch a new initiative for peace – one that boosts diplomacy as the surer route to global security.

Donald Trump, who is on the campaign trail as the Republican nominee for president, has promised to up the ante if he is elected by pressing NATO to reach a new military spending target of 3 per cent of GDP. NATO’s assistant secretary-general for defence policy and planning, Angus Lapsley, was quick to voice his support, calling the 2 per cent target the “floor” and insisting that spending “will have to rise considerably above” it. The U.S.’s annual spending on defence already represents 3.4 per cent of its GDP.

The world is clearly moving to more and more confrontation in international relations. The relentless Ukraine war, the attacks on Israel and the extraordinary toll of human suffering in Gaza, the breakdown of U.S. and Russian arms-control agreements, and China’s growing nuclear arsenal are tilting the world toward chaos and existential threats that have been unseen since the Second World War.

In this new surge of militarism, diplomacy has been pushed aside, at our collective peril. Without robust diplomacy, sharp increases in military spending lead inevitably to mutual escalation and reduced security. The way out of that self-defeating spiral is strategic dialogue, direct engagement with adversaries, and arms control – in other words, diplomacy.

Canada needs to stop apologizing for its supposedly meagre military efforts and launch an offensive campaign with like-minded countries to put teeth into peace diplomacy and the United Nations’ New Agenda for Peace.

Ottawa should act on two fronts. First, it must debunk the myth that Canada doesn’t carry its weight in military matters. It is already NATO’s seventh-highest military spender by dollar amount, with our $30.5-billion putting us within the top 20 per cent of Alliance military forces. Canada consistently ranks as 15th- to 17th-highest in military spending in the world, well within the top 10 per cent. Canada is also taking timely and sustainable steps to beef up domain awareness and defences through NORAD in the Arctic, and it leads NATO’s multinational battlegroup in Latvia.

Simply repeating the complaint that Canada fails to meet NATO’s 2-per-cent benchmark is not a security strategy. A GDP-linked spending target amounts to a money-making slogan for the defence industry and a formula for perpetually expanding military budgets.

The $10-billion to $15-billion (and counting) of additional annual military spending that it would take to move fully to 2 per cent of GDP, let alone beyond that, would mean starving the already underfunded health, housing, and other social and climate mitigation programs on which Canadians rely.

Second, Canada has the credentials to help invigorate the international system to better understand the underlying drivers of conflict, to renew efforts to build support for more effective collective security responses, and to take meaningful steps to manage emerging risks. In other words, Canada should move to a holistic approach to conflict and peace. Unfortunately, NATO doesn’t do holistic peace.

Last year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres laid out a comprehensive set of measures for global security in A New Agenda for Peace. He called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, preventative diplomacy to head off wars, more support for the Sustainable Development Goals to address the underlying causes of violence and insecurity, the reinforcement of climate action, and expanded peacebuilding efforts.

Mr. Guterres’s proposed approach is the right one, but he can’t be heard amid today’s clamour for more military spending. For Canada to move beyond the simplistic 2-per-cent formula would require vision and initiative from its political, military, and diplomatic leaders. Instead of playing catch-up in NATO, which is already spending 10 times more than Russia on defence, Canada should advance security by boosting diplomacy, peacekeeping and peacemaking efforts. That is what the world needs – not more arms.

Canada has a history of sparking creative initiatives, including the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, the International Criminal Court, and the Responsibility to Protect pledge. We can summon that creativity again, but only if we refuse to be intimidated by myopic demands by NATO and the U.S. for ever more military spending.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-should-invest-in-diplomacy-instead-of-spending-more-on-defence/

 

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