He pulled our negotiators from the table and said Washington’s offer wasn’t good enough — not on autos, not on culture, not on our sovereignty.

And it got me thinking about all the other times we’ve done this.

Canada’s not as deferential as we sometimes think

There’s a mythology that Canada is a fundamentally accommodating country, and that Trump-era defiance is something new we’ve had to discover. It isn’t. We’ve said no before, and usually been better off for it.

1963 — Diefenbaker and the Bomarcs. Canada had agreed to host American Bomarc missiles, useless without nuclear warheads Washington wanted stored here under U.S. control. John Diefenbaker’s government stalled for years — a dispute that helped bring down his government, ironically replaced by Pearson’s Liberals, who accepted the warheads.

1965 — Pearson and Vietnam. Canada never sent troops, but Pearson went further: at Temple University, he urged a pause in the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. LBJ summoned him to Camp David and reportedly grabbed him by the lapels: “Why did you have to piss on my rug?” Pearson kept us out anyway.

1985 — Mulroney skips “Star Wars.” One of our most pro-American PMs still declined Reagan’s invitation to join the Strategic Defence Initiative that would have put weapons in space, concluding there wasn’t much in it for us and we’d have no say in how it ran. Sound familiar?

2003 — Chrétien and Iraq. Told Canadians we wouldn’t join the invasion without UN authorization. History didn’t exactly vindicate the war.

2005 — Martin and missile defence. Declined Bush’s invitation to join continental ballistic missile defence — same objection as 1985: sovereignty over weapons we don’t control.

2026 — Carney and the trade table. Same instinct, new arena. Refusing terms that touched Canadian culture, autos, and sovereignty is what a “true economic partnership” was supposed to rule out.

None of these decisions were reflexive anti-Americanism —saying no was refusing a specific bad deal, or bad war.

What I keep coming back to, as someone who spends his days thinking about peace and disarmament: nearly all of them are explicitly about weapons and war — Bomarcs, Star Wars, Iraq. The instinct is to say “not with our sovereignty, and not with weapons systems we don’t control.”

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Help gather signatures for Peace Train Canada

Peace Train Canada is calling on our government to establish and fund an independent, integrated Canadian Centre for Peace and Justice focused on research, policy, diplomacy, peace education, and training for Canadian civilians, police, military personnel, and the international community, as a fundamental part of Canada’s increased commitment to defence and security.

You can help by gathering names on this petition you can download and print.

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Peace Train Canada is supported by PeaceQuest, and I’m proud to serve on its advisory board. info@peacetraincanada.com

Last week’s poll results

Last week we looked at the legacy of nuclear waste. Canada is a major exporter of uranium, and I asked you, “Is Canada accountable for the use and disposal of nuclear materials and waste by our foreign buyers?”

Most people said, yes, we bear a responsibility (65%). While some said not really, we have no control (9%). Fully one-in-four didn’t take either view, saying they were not sure and it's complicated (25%).

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What they found

Between late May and late June this year, the research ship Pourquoi Pas? and its submersible Nautile spent weeks combing a patch of the north-east Atlantic roughly 650 kilometres off the coast of France and Spain, at depths between 3,000 and nearly 4,700 metres.

Using sonar and close-range cameras, the CNRS-led NODSSUM mission mapped more than 3,300 individual containers and estimated that upward of 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste are sitting on the seabed there — corroded, some visibly leaking, and slowly becoming part of the deep-sea ecosystem. Sediment cores and biological samples came back showing cobalt-60, caesium-137 and americium-241 — man-made isotopes with no other plausible source. Scientists are careful to say they don’t yet know how far, or how fast, that contamination is spreading through the food chain. That’s the honest, unsettling answer: they don’t know yet, and neither do we.

Where did it come from?

Here’s the part that should make Canadians sit up. This wasn’t a rogue dumping operation. It was legal, permitted, and coordinated — for decades.

Between roughly 1949 and 1982, at least nine countries used the north-east Atlantic as a radioactive dumping ground under the watch of what’s now the OSPAR Commission and its predecessor bodies. All told, an estimated 150,000 tonnes of waste went over the side of ships. Some of the biggest contributors:

• The United Kingdom — responsible for the largest share by far, roughly 78% of the total radioactivity dumped

• France — including a documented 46,000 barrels dumped over just two years, 1967–69

• Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Italy

The waste came from nuclear power plants, fuel reprocessing plants, hospitals, research labs and decommissioned reactors.

Wait — isn’t this illegal?

Yes, now. The London Convention banned dumping high-level waste at sea in 1972 and added a voluntary moratorium on low- and intermediate-level waste in 1983. OSPAR made the ban binding and permanent for the north-east Atlantic in 1992, and the London Convention’s 1993 amendment turned that into a global ban on dumping any radioactive waste at sea, in force since 1994.

So what we’re looking at is a toxic hangover from a period when this was perfectly legal — a reminder that “legal at the time” and “safe” are two very different things, and that today’s approved industrial practice is tomorrow’s Atlantic-floor scandal.

The Canadian question

So where does Canada fit into a story about European countries dumping barrels decades ago? Not directly — there’s no evidence Canada dumped waste in the Atlantic. But look at the fuel cycle, and a harder question appears.

Canada is the world’s second largest producer of uranium, with about 13% of total world production. Through Canada’s mines in northern Saskatchewan, we are a longtime supplier to France’s nuclear power complex.

Could some of the fission products now leaching into the Atlantic have started life as Canadian ore?

There is no firm link, but Canada has been a major global uranium exporter since the 1950s, long before anyone was tracking — let alone disclosing — exactly whose ore ended up in whose reactor, whose fuel rods, and eventually whose waste barrel.

That uncertainty is itself the point. Canada exports roughly 90% of the uranium it mines, and has spent seventy years doing so with remarkably little public conversation about where it ends up — or what happens to it, and to the waste it becomes, decades later.

Why this matters here at home

Canada has already chosen a site for its own permanent deep geological repository for high-level nuclear waste — a decision meant to hold for tens of thousands of years — but the project still faces regulatory approval and has yet to secure the consent of local First Nations before construction can begin.

The Atlantic barrels are a case study in what happens when a generation decides a disposal method is safe enough, and leaves the bill for later generations to discover, quite literally, in the dark. We should be asking harder questions about where our uranium goes and what obligations — moral, if not legal — follow it there.

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Last week’s poll results

Last week we imagined what the world might be like if Prime Minister Carney used his international prestige to champion peacebuilding. I asked you, “Should Prime Minister Carney use his international influence to champion peacebuilding over increased military spending?”

Nine-in-ten readers said, “Yes, lead a diplomatic pivot.” One-in-ten felt that defence should be the priority, or there should be a balance between defence and diplomacy.

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So I read his latest piece in Policy Magazine closely — and I’m excited that he has a new book coming, Values/Chaos: Discovering Mark Carney and Canada’s Role in a Ruptured World.

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Values or chaos?

Roche gives Carney credit as an internationally respected figure, but he doesn’t pull punches. He argues Carney has inverted the value system he laid out in his own 2021 book, which Carney titled Value(s): Building a Better World for All.

Instead, Mark Carney is pushing defence spending to 5% of GDP while cutting diplomacy and foreign assistance. Global Affairs Canada gets $7 billion; the military gets $63 billion, nine times as much. For Roche, that ratio is the tell: “the value of our strength” has quietly replaced “the strength of our values.”

Guns over blue helmets

That critique echoes what we wrote here last week: Canada is shuttering nearly all its UN peacekeeping missions — in the DRC, South Sudan, Cyprus, and Kosovo — by 2027, leaving us ranked around 70th among troop-contributing nations. Guns for NATO, none for peacekeeping.

Roche’s essay and our own reporting point to the same uncomfortable truth: the country that invented peacekeeping, built the landmine treaty, and helped create the International Criminal Court is walking away from that legacy just as the world needs it most.

What if Carney chose peace?

It’s worth pausing to imagine another path. Carney has emerged as one of the most respected and closely watched figures on the world stage — a rare Canadian voice with real credibility in rooms most of our leaders never enter. What if he used that prestige to break from conventional military thinking rather than reinforce it?

Roche has watched ten Prime Ministers since entering politics in 1972. They all faced challenges, but many still managed to find an independent voice for Canada.

“Pearson started UN peacekeeping, Mulroney rejected apartheid, Chrétien kept Canada out of the Iraq War, Martin said no to missile defence. Their courage in going against American pressure allowed Canada to lead in developing both the Ottawa Treaty on landmines and the International Criminal Court,” he writes.

So, imagine Carney championing preventive diplomacy, nuclear disarmament, and a reoriented international system built around peacebuilding instead of burden-sharing targets.

“The Canadian prime minister is uniquely placed to restore confidence in multilateral institutions through a pragmatic emphasis on diplomacy, accountability and reform,” says Roche.

“Carney needs to think beyond NATO to be a credible world leader. It is the existential threat of climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics and forced migrations of peoples that also challenge Canada’s security,” says Roche. Few leaders alive have the standing to make that case. It would be a legacy far larger than hitting NATO’s 2%.

Heeding Roche’s call

The United Nations’ Charter sets out its mission to, “promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources.” (Article 26)

How can this be achieved? How can we create peace without diverting trillions of dollars from meeting human needs to buying ever-more deadly weapons?

Roche’s answer is “common security” — cooperative, diplomatic, multilateral. It’s a call worth heeding, and one more reason to watch for his book this fall.

Read Where Does Peace fit in Mark Carney's Global Vision? - Policy Magazine

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Readers want Canada to support UN Peacekeeping

Last week I shared the terrible news that Canada is practically abandoning UN peacekeeping. I asked you, “As Canada ramps up NATO defence spending, should it also maintain a serious UN peacekeeping commitment?” Nearly everyone (96%) agreed that yes, the two aren’t a trade-off.

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On July 17, National Defence quietly confirmed it is closing four peacekeeping operations and gutting a fifth.

Operation CROCODILE, our contribution to the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Operation SOPRANO, our presence with the UN mission in South Sudan, will both wind down by mid-2027. Operation SNOWGOOSE, our long-standing support to the UN force in Cyprus, ends on the same timeline, and Operation KOBOLD, our small footprint in Kosovo, disappears by year’s end.

When the dust settles, Canada’s entire UN peacekeeping presence will shrink to a handful of officers with UNTSO — the same Middle East mission Canada joined back in 1954.

It is our lowest commitment since 1956, when Lester Pearson proposed the first UN Emergency Force and won Canada its first Nobel Peace Prize. Canada, once the world’s leading peacekeeping nation, now ranks around 70th among UN troop-contributing countries.

Professor Walter Dorn, who has tracked Canadian peacekeeping for decades, called the news “very disappointing.” “Canada ignores global security to its peril,” he warned, adding that this decision “kills a long and proud tradition of Canadian peacekeeping” — one built, in part, on lessons from two world wars about why global security has to be taken seriously, everywhere, not just where it’s convenient.

The timing makes it worse. This spring, Ottawa announced it had hit NATO’s 2% GDP defence-spending target — over $63 billion, the largest year-over-year defence increase in generations — and committed to reaching 5% of GDP (3.5% core, 1.5% broader security) by 2035, roughly half a trillion dollars over the next decade. Yet the UN missions that need Canadians most, in the Congo and South Sudan, get almost nothing. Guns for NATO, none for peacekeeping.

Dorn said the Canadian government feels that the military is overstretched, but that he doesn’t believe it to be the case.

“We could definitely double or triple our size and not have any operational effect on any other areas of the world,” Prof. Dorn told The Hill Times. One area that the mission closure will be felt the most is in the DRC, where a war has been ongoing for more than four years. “There’s a huge need there,” he added.

Canada invented modern peacekeeping. We are dismantling it, operation by operation, even as we write enormous cheques for a different kind of security altogether. It is a proud tradition being allowed to quietly expire.

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Are the two so very different? Or is this another example of “living within a lie” that Prime Minister Carney used to describe the unfair world in his famous Davos speech.

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This is the second of three special newsletters highlighting other important articles: and this week we are reading former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy’s latest, entitled, “Canada must reclaim its nuclear judgement.”

Lloyd Axworthy argues that Canada’s nuclear identity has always rested on deliberate choice rather than inability. In 1946, with the capacity to build nuclear weapons, Canada instead chose restraint and international control — a decision that shaped our long-standing reputation as a champion of non-proliferation.

Axworthy contrasts that founding judgment with today’s more passive posture: Canada remains outside the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, rarely challenges the contradictions within the NPT system, and — most pointedly — has stayed silent on the new U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear agreement, which reportedly includes uranium enrichment rights.

He argues this silence is telling, since Washington has simultaneously used force against Iran’s nuclear program, exposing a double standard where enrichment is treated as dangerous for adversaries but tolerable for partners.

He points to Canada’s own history — India’s 1974 test using Canadian-supplied plutonium technology — as proof that peaceful nuclear cooperation can curdle into proliferation risk.

Axworthy’s remedy is a single consistent standard: civilian nuclear cooperation should be judged the same way everywhere, backed by rigorous safeguards, verification, and transparency, and he calls for a new parliamentary inquiry into nuclear policy given how much the global landscape has shifted.

His closing argument is that recovering this judgment doesn’t require Canada to break with its allies, just to find its voice again.

It’s a timely piece to run alongside the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week — a moment that gives extra weight to Axworthy’s warning that nuclear norms are eroding while the countries that could speak up choose not to.

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Lloyd axworthy

Canada Must Reclaim its Nuclear Judgement

Canada’s nuclear story has always been one of choice. In 1946, with Hiroshima still smouldering, Canada could have become a nuclear weapons state. It had the uranium, the scientific expertise, the industrial base, and the wartime experience to do so. Instead, the St. Laurent government chose a different path, pressing for international control of nuclea…

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a month ago · 42 likes · 15 comments · Lloyd axworthy

Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition

A reminder that the anniversaries of the horrific atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are coming up this week on August 6 and August 9, respectively. PeaceQuest is a co-sponsor of events in Toronto organized by the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition.

Security in Peace – Eliminate Nuclear Weapons

Commemoration on the 81st Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

The Peace Garden | Toronto City Hall, Thursday, August 6, 2026

4:30 - 6:30 PM Community & Craft Tables
6:30 - 8:30 PM Commemoration Ceremony
8:30 - Lantern Ceremony
Guest speaker: Cesar Jaramillo

Learn more and be sure to watch for events in your community.

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• My thanks to friends at Presentation Manor in Scarborough, Ontario who asked me to come and share the fascinating history of PeaceQuest and its peace education mission.

• Also, this week I was in Charlottetown, PEI where I was an invited speaker at the inaugural peace rally by the new PEI Peace Coalition, along with friends from CUPE PEI, the Council of Canadians, and many more.

Summer is also a great time to branch out to enjoy some of the other excellent articles on the Substack platform – including this top-rated post by our friend Seth Klein.

In this post titled “No new fossil fuel projects on a burning planet,” Seth criticizes Prime Minister Carney’s new partnership deals with Alberta and BC, which greenlight a new bitumen pipeline to Roberts Bank despite unmet conditions from the original agreement—no private proponent materialized and the promised Pathways CCS project now pledges to capture far less carbon than assured—with the federal government footing roughly 90% of the pipeline’s $44 billion cost and BC receiving billions partly earmarked for its own fossil fuel expansion.

I am on vacation for the next few weeks, but will be sharing some recommended readings each Saturday morning in the PeaceQuest newsletter. I hope you enjoy them.

Steve Staples
PeaceQuest

Birds in Ukraine have started building their nests out of fibre optic cable — spooled off the back of drones and left tangled in trees and hedgerows across the front lines.

It sounds almost fanciful, but it isn’t. I think it’s actually a signal — a small, visible symptom of a much bigger and largely unstudied problem spreading across Ukraine’s battlefields.

There are countless kilometres upon kilometres of plastic cable unspooling behind drones every day, settling into fields, forests, and towns, with almost nobody yet able to say what it will do to the land or the animals living there.

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This week I want to introduce you to fibre optic FPV drones — how they work, why they’ve become so central to this war, and why the debris they leave behind might be one of the quieter, longer-lasting environmental legacies of the whole conflict.

Spider webs over the battlefield

Soldiers and journalists have started describing entire villages and tree lines as looking like they’ve been wrapped in spider silk.

As these drones race toward their targets, they trail a hair-thin strand of optical fibre behind them, and because so many drones fly so many missions, the accumulated effect is a real physical landscape of thread: glinting in sunlight, snagged on branches, draped over fences and vehicles, settling into farmers’ fields.

DroneXL, reporting on the phenomenon earlier this year, described the result as a landscape that looks like spider silk caught in the sun — striking, but with unknown consequences.

None of this cable is recovered in any organized way. It’s simply left where it falls, mixed in with unexploded ordnance and all the other detritus of modern war.

How these drones actually work

An FPV (first-person-view) drone is flown by an operator wearing video goggles connected to a camera on the drone itself. The pilot effectively “sees” through the machine while hunting for a target to strike with a grenade or explosive charge strapped to the airframe: a building, a vehicle, or a person.

Early in the war, these drones ran on radio signal, which meant they could be jammed by electronic warfare. Fibre optic drones solve that by physically tethering the drone to its operator with a cable — sometimes stretching many kilometres — thinner than ordinary fishing line. No radio signal means nothing for jamming equipment to disrupt, which is why both Russian and Ukrainian forces have raced to adopt the technology.

The environmental question nobody has answered yet

The core of these cables is typically a plastic called PMMA, wrapped in a fluoropolymer cladding — the same broad chemical family as PFAS, the “forever chemicals” now drawing scrutiny elsewhere. Researchers at the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) flag overlapping concerns: cables that could persist for hundreds of years, entanglement risks for birds, bats, and ground-dwelling animals, and cables that act like invisible fences cutting off habitat and migration routes.

One researcher who studies the war’s impact on migratory birds told CEOBS these fibre webs will pose a real entanglement danger to threatened species for years to come.

There’s also the question of degradation. Combat zones are hard on plastic, and there’s early evidence that breakdown could release microplastics and, if burned, toxic gases. Batteries from crashed drones add their own contamination risk, one some researchers believe may ultimately outweigh the cable itself, though this too is barely studied.

Then there’s the cleanup problem. Fibre strands tangled through a field make mechanical demining more difficult and dangerous, in a country already facing one of the largest demining efforts in modern history. Nobody planned for a war that leaves behind both explosive remnants and an invisible mesh of plastic threaded through them.

Closer to home

In late May, Canada and Ukraine signed an agreement to manufacture Ukrainian-designed drones on Canadian soil, through a new joint venture called Airlogix-Sentinel, pairing a Ukrainian defence tech firm with Sentinel Research and Development, a Hamilton, Ontario manufacturer.

The initial focus appears to be reconnaissance drones rather than fibre optic FPV strike drones — but given how central fibre optic technology has become to Ukraine’s ability to operate under heavy electronic warfare, a future iteration of this kind of partnership moving in that direction wouldn’t be surprising. Ukraine needs a steady supply of these systems, and manufacturing them somewhere outside the range of Russian strikes on fibre optic plants has an obvious appeal.

A technology whose battlefield debris we don’t yet understand could soon be manufactured, at least in some form, here at home.

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Last week’s poll

Over the last two weeks we took a close-up view of Prime Minister Carney’s military ambitions for Canada – not just recruiting more soldiers and buying new equipment, but also retooling parts of Canada’s economy to building weapons and selling them on the global market.

I asked you what you thought was the impetus for this massive new expenditure of public dollars on defence.

But counter to a reason often citied on the news, nobody chose the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the main driver.

By far, most people pointed their finger much closer to home: Donald Trump (59%). The rest of the opinions were roughly divided evenly between jobs and the economy (17%), keeping Canada safe (15%), and international obligations and NATO (10%).

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Producer Imogen Birchard opens with something worth sitting with: Carney’s entire pitch for this buildup rests on the idea that the United States is now a danger to Canada.

“They want our land, our resources, our water, our country,” he’s said. That’s the justification for spending so much, and for spending it here at home rather than sending it south.

But as NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte cheerfully reminded a summit last year — while calling Trump “daddy,” of all things — none of this 5%-of-GDP spending spree would be happening without Trump pushing for it in the first place.

Buy Canadian, sort of

Ottawa Citizen defence reporter David Pugliese lays out the fact that roughly 70 cents of every capital defence dollar currently goes to American companies. The Defence Industrial Strategy wants to flip that so 70% goes to Canadian firms instead. Good luck.

The F-35 fighter aircraft saga shows how hard that flip actually is — Carney ordered a review, and the U.S. ambassador reportedly started making threats about what happens if Canada doesn’t buy the planes, while retired Canadian generals with ties to U.S. contractors kept showing up in the media pushing for them anyway.

This month, Canada also confirmed a $2.6-billion direct purchase of 26 HIMARS rocket launchers from the U.S. government – a controversial weapon system of the type Canada has never owned, and can deliver devastating cluster bombs.

Project Ploughshares researcher Kelsey Gallagher points out that five of Canada’s top ten arms manufacturers are American branch plants operating in Canada — General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris among them.

When Defence Minister David McGuinty announced $1.4 billion for domestic ammunition production this spring, most of it went to a Quebec subsidiary of General Dynamics – a U.S.-owned company. Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, put it well at when asked about the deal at CANSEC. He said, a wholly-owned American subsidiary isn’t what “Canadian” is supposed to mean.

The path of least resistance

Here’s the part that should worry every PeaceQuest reader – it’s what I have described as Carney’s plan’s fatal flaw.

The strategy’s other big goal is growing arms exports by 50% — Gallagher calls it the most aggressive export increase in Canadian history. And given how integrated our defence industry already is with the U.S., he expects most of that growth to flow along the path of least resistance: south of the border, to the one buyer that’s already there.

Which matters, because Gallagher’s research found an Ontario-built L3Harris camera system was used to track boats in at least two of the U.S. military’s strikes in the Caribbean this year — strikes that have killed over 200 people and that human rights monitors have called extrajudicial killings.

Canada has given up a say in any of this. Because of the “long-standing” defence trade relationship with Washington, the vast majority of arms transfers to the U.S. move without a permit and without a human rights risk assessment — despite Canada’s obligations under the UN Arms Trade Treaty. An NDP bill to close that gap, the No More Loopholes Act, was opposed by the government (Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand called it “irresponsible”) and failed, even after 15 Liberal MPs broke rank to support it.

Where the parts really end up

The indirect transfers of weapons to third countries are just as troubling. Canada paused new arms export authorizations to Israel back in January 2024. But Canadian-made components — worth roughly $3 million per aircraft — still reach Israel anyway, built into F-35s sold by Lockheed Martin in the U.S. and used throughout the bombardment of Gaza. As Gallagher puts it, a wingtip might seem less dangerous than a rifle, but an F-35 can’t fly a strike on Gaza without its constituent parts.

And then there’s Saudi Arabia, the second-largest recipient of Canadian arms after the U.S.: $1.3 billion in 2024, mostly Canadian made light armoured vehicles tied to the 2014 contract — the largest arms deal in Canadian history. That relationship traces back to the 1990s, when a U.S.-owned plant in London, Ontario needed a new customer after U.S. Army orders dried up.

Justin Trudeau’s government talked about getting out of the deal after the Yemen war and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but backed off once it became clear cancelling would trigger massive penalties. A 2020 government review concluded, almost unbelievably, that these exports “contribute to regional peace and security.” Later that year, a UN panel found Canada was helping fuel the war in Yemen. The exports continued anyway.

The value of our strength

Carney closed his CANSEC speech with a line he’s clearly fond of: “Canada will be defined not only by the strength of our values but also the value of our strength.” It’s a good line. It’s also the whole question this documentary is really asking.

As Canada chases 125,000 new defence jobs and a 50% jump in arms exports, what happens when keeping those jobs “long-term and stable” means finding buyers who’ll keep the production lines running — values or no values? Once you’ve built a defence economy, as one voice in the episode notes, you need your product to be used. History suggests we already know what that trade-off looks like.

If part one was about the gold rush, part two is about the bill that always comes due. Worth the 25 minutes.

Listen to Front Burner, part two: Canada’s massive military buildup: Part 2

Listen to last week’s Part 1, if you missed it.

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Readers believe Carney’s promise to quadruple military spending

Last week we dove into Carney’s defence strategy and I asked you, “Do you believe PM Carney when he promises to quadruple military spending to $150 billion?”

Most people said yes, they believe this is Mark Carney’s plan (52%), but one quarter agreed with the caveat that things could change (28%). A small number (16%) felt PM Carney was just trying to appease Trump, suggesting he may not go through with the military build-up he’s announced.

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Producer Imogen Birchard spent last month’s CANSEC — Canada’s biggest arms trade show — wandering the Ottawa convention floor.

What she found says more about where this country is headed than any government press release could.

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Birchard found CANSEC’s “parking lot” full of light armoured vehicles and mine-resistant troop carriers, and inside, a room packed with soldiers in camo, naval officers in dress whites, foreign military delegations, bankers, and a small army of former cabinet ministers now working the defence-industry circuit — including two former defence ministers and a former Conservative party leader. She calls it a schmooze-fest, but with a lot more weapons of war.

The gear on display included sniper rifles, shoulder-fired rocket launchers loaded with munitions designed to scatter thousands of metal fragments, and a missile display running a looping video of targets exploding. There were combat drones with what one exhibitor delicately called “drop mechanisms” for munitions, and at least two makes of armed robot dog, including a Boston Dynamics model that one salesman mused might soon mean robots fighting robots on future battlefields — before admitting he wasn’t sure that was actually good news.

The first PM to address the arms show

Mark Carney, the first sitting prime minister ever to address CANSEC, arrived to a standing ovation. He told the crowd Canada has already hit NATO’s old 2% defence-spending target and reminded them that a new NATO target — 5% of GDP by 2035 — is now on the table too. That's roughly $150 billion a year — more than Canada currently spends combined on Old Age Security, EI, and the Canada Child Benefit — a figure Carney himself supplied when CNN's Christiane Amanpour pressed him on it last summer.

A gold rush for arms producers

Exhibitors told Birchard they’d never seen anything like it — one 16-year CANSEC veteran said past shows felt so empty you could fire a cannon through the hall; this year it was packed.

Defence reporter David Pugliese, who’s covered the industry for four decades, described it as a gold rush: “I’ve never seen an industry in the last 40 years so energized,” he told Birchard, adding retired generals are now filling seats on corporate boards.

Beyond the police lines

Outside, beyond police lines, a much smaller crowd told a different story. Dr. Kavita Algu, a physician, spoke about watching colleagues killed by weapons sold at shows just like this one, in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, and connected the government’s defence spending directly to its failure to expand pharmacare.

The naive question that isn’t naive

Kelsey Gallagher of Project Ploughshares — an organization PeaceQuest readers will recognize from past posts on Turkey and Saudi Arabia — told Birchard that dismissing critics such as him as naive gets the risk backwards. “Arms proliferation makes conflict more likely to occur,” he said, adding that it also makes conflict more severe and longer-lasting, with civilians paying the price.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer and the conservative C.D. Howe Institute have separately warned that Ottawa still hasn’t explained how it plans to pay for any of this without cutting social spending, raising taxes, or both — the “clear and open conversation” Carney has promised but not yet delivered.

“We are at war”

The most chilling voice in part one, for me, came from Robert Houston of Saab, the Swedish arms manufacturer, who told Birchard plainly that Canada is already at war in a global sense, given the invasion of Ukraine, and that geography no longer offers the protection we like to think it does.

Who’s going to buy all this?

That framing — of a world grown suddenly, urgently dangerous — is doing a lot of damage. It’s what turns military spending into a moral imperative, and what makes a room full of Canadian bankers, generals, and arms dealers erupt for a prime minister.

But as regular readers know, I keep coming back to the same question the protesters outside were asking louder than anyone in the room: if Canada is going to build a permanent weapons industry, someone eventually has to buy those weapons. Once the government contracts for Canada’s military are finished, the pressure is on to keep the manufacturing lines running. That means one thing: foreign arms sales.

Front Burner’s second part of the series will focus on Canada’s push to grow arms exports and its tangled defence relationship with Washington.

If this is new territory for you, it’s worth 25 minutes of your week to give a listen to Front Burner — one of my favourite podcasts.

Listen to Front Burner:

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Few think AI and new technologies will bring any good to Canada

Few readers think AI and new technologies will bring any good to Canada.

Last week we looked at the high-tech players lobbying the Carney government very hard to adopt their agenda for a big expansion of AI and new technologies. I asked you, “What’s your reaction to AI and other new technology developments?”

Only one-in-ten respondents (11%) said it would be somewhat good for Canada and one-in-five didn’t know or were unsure (21%). While two-thirds of respondents felt AI and other new technologies will be bad for Canada (68%), with most of those people fearing it will be “very bad.”

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And it raises urgent questions about democracy, sovereignty, and human rights.

A three-part investigative series published this week by Christopher Holcroft in The Tyee pulls back the curtain on a powerful and little-known advocacy group called Build Canada — and what it reveals should concern anyone who cares about peace, democracy, and the public interest.

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Build Canada was founded in early 2025 by wealthy tech entrepreneurs whose policy agenda has been characterized as indistinguishable from Silicon Valley’s. The group publishes a steady stream of policy memos aimed at shaping federal government decisions — and it’s working. Holcroft documents how the Carney government has aligned its policies with Build Canada’s recommendations across nearly 20 areas.

The policy wins are sweeping — and alarming

The list of Build Canada-aligned government actions is long. It includes slashing public spending, eliminating tens of thousands of public sector jobs, embedding corporate leaders into the civil service, passing punitive immigration and refugee reforms, reducing international aid, and gutting climate policy while providing substantial tax breaks and subsidies to businesses.

For peace advocates, one item stands out: developing a military-industrial complex is explicitly on the list of Carney government actions that align with Build Canada’s vision. This is not a fringe position being shouted from the margins — it is now government policy, promoted by a prime minister with deep ties to the tech and finance worlds.

Build Canada’s other proposals include reducing funding for Indigenous programs by up to $12 billion annually, reducing old age security benefits, and weakening copyright laws in favour of AI innovation. It’s an agenda that redistributes wealth upward while cutting programs that serve the most vulnerable.

Selling off Canada’s public digital innovation

Part two of the series digs into a specific and troubling case: the privatization of the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre (CPFC).

The CPFC is the only semiconductor facility of its kind in North America. Its chips have applications in aerospace, automotive, defence, and telecommunications — and they are increasingly vital to AI technology. The federal government has invested more than $115 million into the centre over the last five years.

The decision to privatize it came after an AI firm at the heart of Build Canada, Cohere, published a memo calling for the government to “commercialize” the CPFC. Cohere has met with the Carney government 31 times.

Critics are drawing parallels to past privatization disasters. Senator Colin Deacon has cited the example of the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, privatized in the 1980s, and the loss of domestic vaccine technology that became painfully evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is also a human rights dimension that deserves attention. Cohere has reported but disputed ties to Palantir — a company the ACLU accuses of providing tools to facilitate the violence, lawlessness, and human rights violations of President Trump’s war on immigrants. The government’s choice to contract this firm to transform the public sector with AI raises serious questions about whose values are being embedded into Canadian institutions.

As Holcroft notes, some within Build Canada are also pushing to allow foreign ownership of Canadian telecommunications companies — a move that would further erode the very sovereignty the CPFC was built to protect.

They built a robot politician — and it’s voting against you

The third article is the most extraordinary. Shortly after the last election, Build Canada created what it calls the world’s “first AI member of Parliament.” The “Builder MP” uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 to review every bill introduced in Parliament, summarize it, analyze it against Build Canada’s economic freedom agenda, and assign it a vote.

The results are revealing. The AI MP opposed legislation to create a guaranteed livable basic income, a national ADHD framework, a strategy for children and youth, and housing supports for homeless Canadians — because, in the AI’s own framing, such measures do not promote “economic freedom” or “large-scale prosperity reform.”

On bills concerning First Nations treaties, Indigenous rights, and residential school denialism, the AI abstained or voted no. A bill offering extended bereavement leave to parents of children who have died was rejected because it is “not a large-scale prosperity reform.”

Holcroft connects this to what one scholar calls “Big Tech authoritarianism”: the offloading of political rights, civic responsibility, and democratic accountability from citizens and their elected leaders to private interests and their programmable machines.

Why this matters for peace advocates

For those of us working for peace and human rights, this series raises concerns that go well beyond tech policy. An agenda that promotes a military-industrial complex, slashes international aid, weakens Indigenous rights, punishes refugees and immigrants, and privatizes critical defence-related infrastructure — all while reducing democratic accountability — is an agenda in conflict with the values of peace, justice, and human security.

The Carney government likes to talk about “building Canada.” But as Holcroft asks: building it for whom?

• Read the full three-part series at The Tyee.

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Readers want an economy that respects human rights

Last week, PeaceQuest looked at troubling findings by Internet sleuths, and confirmed by the CBC, that Canadian weapons are being used in horrific conflicts in Africa. In previous articles I have pointed out that one of the central flaws in PM Carney’s plans to dramatically ramp-up Canada’s defence industry is that our arms control regime is far too weak.

I asked you to respond to this statement: “It’s possible for Canada to forge new trade and business ties while protecting human rights.”

Two-thirds (67%) of respondents said they strongly agreed, while one in five somewhat agreed (18%). One-in-twenty disagreed (6%) and one-in-ten didn’t know (10%).

Readers comments:

• “We should also nationalize all arms manufacturing.” - B. Stuart

• “[The government is] giving lip service to human rights and climate change, while blowing carbon emissions targets and inviting more fossil fuel investments, and not keeping Canadian-made weapons out of the hands of international criminals.” - S. Cano

• “Shameful for Canada to be involved in any way in the horrors of what’s happening in Sudan.” - B. Gombay

• “It should be entirely possible for Canada to undertake trade diversification while preserving its commitment to human rights.” - J. Carmichael

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Yet that is exactly what a CBC News visual investigation has now documented — again.

The discovery is raising urgent questions about the Canadian arms trade, the enforcement of arms embargoes, and the gap between Canada’s stated values and its real-world record on weapons accountability.

The company is Sterling Cross Defense Systems, based in Abbotsford, B.C. The rifle is its XLCR precision bolt-action model. And the fighters brandishing it in verified photographs and videos are members of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a paramilitary group accused of civilian massacres, torture, and war crimes.

Images were first provided to CBC News by an online user known as streakingdelilah. CBC independently sourced and verified all photos and videos, sharing them with researchers at Bellingcat and the Centre for Information Resilience, which runs the Sudan Witness project.

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A pattern, not an anomaly

In November 2025, CBC verified at least nine separate images of RSF fighters carrying Sterling Cross XLCR rifles throughout Sudan — some geolocated, others confirmed by matching the distinctive logo on the rifle. The images date back to at least 2023.

The RSF has been one of the primary actors in a conflict that has killed an estimated 150,000 people and internally displaced more than 12 million civilians. The city of El Fasher, besieged for months, fell to RSF forces in October 2024, with reports of horrific civilian massacres following immediately after.

This week, CBC published a follow-up investigation showing the problem is not limited to Sudan. Canadian-made Sterling Cross rifles are now visible in the hands of a Libyan militia unit, and are openly advertised for sale online by arms dealers in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. CBC identified a specific serial number on one of the rifles offered for sale in Yemen.

Canada has had an arms embargo on Sudan since 2004

Canada has officially maintained an arms embargo on Sudan for over two decades. Material and financial sanctions against entities involved in Sudan’s conflict were added in 2024. Sudan, Libya, and Yemen are all subject to Canadian arms restrictions — and, in several cases, UN arms embargoes — precisely because they are home to groups responsible for widespread human rights abuses and mass killings.

Yet the rifles showed up anyway.

The United Arab Emirates connection

Experts point to the United Arab Emirates as a likely intermediary. The UAE has long supplied the RSF, and Canada exports significant quantities of weapons and military equipment there.

As Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told CBC: the UAE “does not have a domestic defence industry of its own robust enough to supply multiple paramilitary groups across the region” — making it a documented re-routing hub for Western arms flowing into conflict zones.

Prime Minister Carney at the UAE

Our Prime Minister arrived in the UAE last fall to a lavish military welcome put on by UAE Industry Minister Sultan al-Jaber. There was no press conference, and no opportunity for journalists to witness the meetings.

At the close of the visit, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Ottawa is working on a $1-billion project aimed at expanding critical minerals processing capacity in Canada, while securing the equivalent of $70 billion in investment from the United Arab Emirates.

“We welcome UAE investors to visit Canada — I will personally host them — to explore investment in Canada’s transformative projects,” he said, reported The Canadian Press.

Carney also told reporters that he raised the Sudan civil war with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose government denies accusations it is fuelling ethnic violence in that country.

“We did discuss the situation in Sudan,” Carney said, adding that this centred on the so-called Quad process, where the U.S., the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are working on “establishing a ceasefire and peace consistent with the initiative of President Trump.”

Canada not doing enough

It seems clear that the conflict between Canada seeking investment from the UAE is conflicting with the need to confront the Middle Eastern country over illicit sales of Canadian-made arms to RSF forces in Sudan.

“If Canada was doing enough then we wouldn’t see a pattern of the illicit diversion of Canadian weapons systems in violation of UN arms embargoes,” said Kelsey Gallagher of Project Ploughshares.

Canada presents itself to the world as a country committed to human rights, the rule of law, and multilateralism. We sign arms treaties like the Arms Trade Treaty. We impose embargoes. We issue statements of concern.

PeaceQuest readers know that we have frequently pointed out that the growing danger of Canadian arms exports ending up in terrible conflicts or the hands of human rights offenders is a growing threat.

Prime Minister Mark Carney made a pledge in February to expand Canada’s arms industries by 50%. This will be accomplished through a combination of massive Canadian military spending on local contracts, and sales of weapons abroad.

But Canada’s laws that aim to ensure that these weapons don’t end up in the “wrong hands” are completely inadequate.

Peace advocates and human rights defenders in Canada have been raising these concerns for years. The CBC investigations have now provided the documentary evidence the public needs to demand action. The question is whether the government will respond — or wait for the next investigation to reveal the next batch of Canadian-made weapons in the next war zone.

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PeaceQuest readers bucking the trend on climate

Despite pollsters reporting that the public’s willingness to fight climate change may be softening, most PeaceQuest readers say the level of concern among people they know remains unchanged (40%). Bucking the trend reported in last week’s article, nearly a third say concern about the climate has increased - not decreased - amongst peers (30%). Only one-in-five say climate concern is decreasing (18%).

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New polling by Environics has some important lessons for everyone in the fight against climate change.

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The well-known polling firm Environics has just released a new study called, “2026 Public Opinion - When Climate Isn’t the Only Crisis.”

The study’s authors conclude that the public discussion about climate change has entered a new phase.

There is some good news, and some bad news…

And ultimately some sound advice for people and organizations working to stop climate change (read to the end.)

Read the report

Good news

Five years ago, climate change rose to the top of the public agenda. Global climate strikes, growing public concern, and increasingly visible impacts (floods, wildfires, extreme heat) created a sense of urgency around climate action.

Bad news

Climate impacts today are just as concerning, but Canadians are navigating a more crowded issues environment shaped by affordability pressures, housing challenges, economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and rapid technological change.

Good news

Public debate has finally moved away from whether climate change exists or is caused by humans. That is, it’s real and we’re the cause of it.

Bad news

For some, climate action has become a “nice to have” in a world of more critical imperatives.

Good news

Canadians continue to recognize climate change as a serious issue and support many forms of climate action.

Bad news

Climate occupies less public attention than it did five years ago and public confidence in momentum and progress on climate action is low.

Good news

Large majorities of Canadians continue to describe climate change as at least a somewhat serious problem for the planet (84%), the country (80%), and the area where they live (70%).

Bad news

The share of people describing climate change as a very serious problem at the global, national, and local levels has declined over the past three years. This is true both in Canada and globally.

Good news

Many Canadians continue to expect governments to balance economic and environmental priorities.

Bad news

People may continue to care about climate change and believe action matters, while feeling uncertain about whether meaningful collective progress is happening.

Good news

Most Canadians continue to support phasing out fossil fuels.

Bad news

When asked about priorities for Canada’s climate strategy, respondents place the strongest emphasis on economic resilience and protecting jobs, while fewer prioritize rapid fossil fuel phaseout or meeting international emissions targets.

Good news

People are more likely than not to believe that people like themselves can make a difference on climate change.

The bottom line

How can organizations ​use this research?​

• Ensure decisions are anchored in a coherent and accurate picture of Canadian public opinion and how it is evolving over time (avoiding the swings and distortion of day-to-day social and traditional media coverage).

• Inform communication and engagement strategies that account for the perception gap between experts and the public, and shape messages and language that people understand. ​

• Identify and understand regional nuances and how to address them.​

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Readers pessimistic over prospects for nuclear disarmament

Last week I shared the disappointing news that global disarmament talks at the United Nations had failed to reach a final agreement for the third time in a row. Our poll asked, “When might we rid the world of nuclear weapons?”

One-third of people thought “likely never” (34%) while a roughly equal number felt it would take a frightening crisis first (30%). One quarter of readers answered, “someday, but not my lifetime” (17%) or “sooner than you think” (6%).

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Now comes France to spread its nuclear weapons and influence across Europe.

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In April we issued a warning that U.N. nuclear talks in New York were set to fail – for the third time in a row… Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

Our friend Cesar Jaramillo points to wars involving Ukraine and the Middle East and tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program that led to “fundamental disagreements” on everything, making it impossible to get a final agreement on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

At the same time, American President Trump is turning up the pressure on NATO, withdrawing troops from Europe and pulling U.S. ships and planes from NATO’s defence plan.

Veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Ray Acheson said the spread of nuclear weapons as a result of the failure of U.N. talks and Trump’s withdrawal is very real.

“We are seeing more countries, particularly in Europe, claim that Russia’s aggressive actions against Ukraine mean they need nuclear weapons as deterrents, and since many of them no longer see the United States as a reliable partner in NATO, they are looking to acquire their own nuclear weapons or collaborate with France on new nuclear deterrence arrangements.”

Ray Acheson

We took a deeper look at this possibility earlier:

What’s France up to?

The United Kingdom and France are the only nuclear states in NATO-Europe. But the UK’s submarine-launched weapons are deeply integrated with the United States, making France the only NATO member other than the U.S. that develops and deploys its own nuclear forces.

Defense News says French President Emmanuel Macron plans to expand France’s independent nuclear arsenal and implement a policy of “advanced deterrence” that could include deploying nuclear-capable forces to the territory of willing European allies.

President Macron gave a long-awaited speech in March on the country’s nuclear doctrine:

“We must strengthen our nuclear deterrence in the face of the combination of threats, and we must consider our deterrence strategy in the depth of the European continent, with full respect for our sovereignty, with the gradual implementation of what I would call advanced deterrence.”

French President Emmanuel Macron

President Macron has been recruiting countries who wish to shelter under the French nuclear umbrella.

Norway has become the ninth European country to sign-up for French nuclear protection in light of heightened concerns vis-à-vis Russia and broadly faltering trust in U.S. reliability.

Aside from Norway, Germany and Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium and the U.K. have also joined the new French forward deterrence scheme (no sign of interest from Canada).

How the policy would be implemented is unclear, but it might require forward-basing French Rafale jets armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. (Five NATO states already store U.S. nuclear weapons and Belarus hosts Russian nukes, but under the rules these nations are not counted as nuclear powers on their own.)

France is increasing its nuclear stockpile, while developing a new hypersonic air-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile and a submarine-launched strategic ballistic missile.

Warning of a “domino effect”

Nuclear expert Matt Korda says Russia likes to make verbal threats about its nuclear weapons, while NATO prefers the more low-key, “speak softly and carry a big stick” approach. But make no mistake – NATO is just as active in flexing its nuclear muscle as Russia.

Hear more from Korda on this podcast:

The continued reliance upon nuclear weapons by the big powers and their failure to commit to disarmament, as promised in the NPT, may inspire others to acquire their own nuclear weapons.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency says there could be many more nuclear states waiting in the wings.

Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), warns that the current atmosphere of intense conflict could push up to 20 countries to reconsider nuclear options if they feel their regional security is threatened.

This makes the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons more distant, while making it all the more urgent to achieve a nuclear-free world.

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Readers say spend more on diplomacy

Last week I shared some comments from Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock calling for a new peace agenda for Canada. I asked you, “Should Canada focus as much on diplomacy as defence?”

A slim majority (53%) of people said that Canada should spend more on diplomacy, while the remainder were divided nearly evenly between spending less on defence (22%) and striking a better balance between the two (26%).

Readers comments:

• “Canada was not named by Trump as one of the derelict NATO nations in the Iran conflict. Because we had no military capability left. In the coming years, this will dramatically change and we will need to exercise our ‘no’ for future requests.” – S. Ross

• “If the health and education are not supported where will the military get strong personnel? It seems there are plans to reduce financially these needs are being drastically cut even more than they are now. We the Canadian civilians require both these needs be met to live full lives and hence able to contribute productively.” – H. Hannah

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But former Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and ex-UN Ambassador Allan Rock are asking an uncomfortable question: is that all we've got?

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In a recent op-ed in the Toronto Star, the two veterans of Canada’s internationalist golden age argue that military spending without a human security agenda is not just incomplete — it’s a strategic mistake.

Committing to NATO’s new targets means hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade flowing into ships, jets, missiles and radar systems.

Security, they write, must also be measured in “wars prevented, civilians protected, famines averted, arms flows interrupted and peace processes sustained.” By that standard, Canada’s current policy is falling short.

Sudan: A crisis Canada is failing

The authors point to Sudan as the defining test. The ongoing civil war — described by journalist Anne Applebaum as “the most nihilistic conflict on Earth” — has produced the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, marked by famine, mass displacement, sexual violence and the deliberate obstruction of aid. Ottawa has acknowledged all of this. It has called for an end to the violence and accountability for atrocities. And then, largely, it has moved on.

Axworthy and Rock argue that’s not good enough. They call for a senior Canadian envoy for Sudan, a sustained diplomatic push at the UN, and concrete support for an African-led peace process that centres Sudanese civil society and women mediators. These are not radical asks. They are the kinds of things Canada used to do — and has quietly stopped doing.

As PeaceQuest readers will know, we have pointed out that the “fatal flaw” of Prime Minister Carney’s plan to create a massive defence industry in Canada is the moment government contracts run out, foreign arms sales inevitably follow to keep the production line running. Sometimes those weapons end up in terrible wars far from home.

In April, Axworthy and Rock said they expressed “deep concern” about the federal government’s decision not to pass legislation aimed at closing what they consider a regulatory gap in arms exports.

An NDP private member’s bill meant to treat arms exports from Canada to the United States with the same degree of scrutiny as other countries under the Arms Trade Treaty was defeated by the government (even though more than a dozen Liberals broke ranks to vote in favour).

“Canada’s bilateral relationship with the United States is long-standing and vital, but our responsibilities under international law are our own. No alliance exempts us from our duty to ensure that Canadian weapons or components do not contribute to gross violations of international humanitarian or human rights law. Transparency and parliamentary oversight strengthen sovereignty — they do not weaken it.”

Lloyd axworthy

Canada Needs a Peace Agenda

Canada is embarking on a major military build-up, committing to NATO’s new defence target of 5 percent of GDP by 2035. Some modernization is necessary after years of neglect. But if new military spending comes at the expense of diplomacy and international development, Canada risks weakening the very tools that prevent wars from starting…

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3 months ago · 57 likes · 23 comments · Lloyd axworthy

Axworthy and Rock argue that Canada needs a human security agenda alongside its military renewal.

“If Canada is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding its military, it should also rebuild the diplomatic and humanitarian capacity that helps prevent conflicts from becoming catastrophic in the first place,” they write.

“In short, Canada needs both a robust defence capability and a credible and effective peace agenda.”

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Last week’s poll results

Last week we looked at the thorny issue of Alberta’s referendum, and I asked you, “How should PM Carney handle Alberta separatism?” I contrasted Carney’s realpolitik approach of Alberta appeasement on oil pipelines, with demands that Carney not abandon his principles on protecting the climate.

It’s a tough question, so I gave you a few options to choose from. The most frequently chosen answer was, “Stick to his climate principles” (53%), followed by, “Confront U.S. interference” (25%). A smaller number chose, “Oppose separatists strongly” (11%).

Reader’s comments

• “Carney is working hand in hand with US and international corporate interests… Foreign corporate interference should be exposed not aided.” – S. Wilke

• “Foreign interference… can undermine Canadian sovereignty, divide communities, reduce trust in the country’s institutions and put Canadian rights and freedoms at risk.” – M. Larocque

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and now Danielle Smith has confirmed it: the referendum is going ahead.

How should the Prime Minister respond?

Is he compromising too much with Alberta in a “go-along-to-get-along” strategy? Or is he tactically avoiding making a bad situation even worse, and perhaps outmaneuvering Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in the process?

On Thursday night Premier Danielle Smith announced Albertans will be going to the polls in October to cast their vote on separation - but they won’t actually be voting on whether to separate.

Instead, they’ll be choosing whether or not it’s time to hold a binding referendum on quitting Canada.

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As a Globe and Mail writer said, “Alberta Premier Danielle Smith hasn’t quite set Alberta up for a secession referendum. She’s just coming really, really close – about as close as you can get – and nobody, not the separatists, not the federalists, is all that thrilled about it.”

The Premier’s dangerous strategy

Former Senator Douglas Roche, writing from Edmonton, says that Premier Smith is straddling the separation issue. She knows that the majority of Albertans do not support leaving, so she says her position, and that of her government, is to remain in Canada.

But the minority (about 27%) of Albertans who support separation are a majority within her own party. “This means that Smith is dependent on separatists to remain leader,” writes Roche in the Hill Times.

Jen Gerson, an Alberta-based journalist, says Smith’s dalliance with separatists is dangerous politically for her and the country: “There’s no way to know ahead of a catastrophe that you’ve gone too far this time, found the moment you’ve hit something too deep and dangerous to step back from. Some pits open to a darkness that no one can control.”

Gerson points out that Smith knows this risky politics is why no Alberta Premier since Ralph Klein has actually finished their term.

Read more from Jen Gerson:

The Line

Jen Gerson: Saddle up, Alberta. We're referendum-ing

By: Jen Gerson…

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3 months ago · 265 likes · 132 comments · Jen Gerson

Weaponizing the separatist movement

On the other hand, the threat of separation is politically useful to the Premier in extracting concessions from the federal government and Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Carney and Smith met in Ottawa this month to move along their memorandum of understanding to lay out a pathway for an oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast - something that Premier Smith has long sought out to expand Alberta oil exports, but has met resistance from climate change activists and neighbouring British Columbia.

“Today is also about building trust in a Canada that works” PM Carney told reporters. “We've accomplished a lot together in the last six months,” added Premier Smith.

For many, Carney has gone too far.

Our friend Seth Klein writes on Substack from B.C., the tail pipe of the potential pipeline. “Carney has also gone all-in on supporting new fossil fuel infrastructure. The prime minister is bent on environmental deregulation, exempting projects deemed ‘nation-building’ from some environmental laws,” he says.

Klein feels that many who voted for Carney because they believed he would be an ally in the fight against climate change have been let down, “As plank after plank of Canada’s climate strategy is dismantled, more and more of those climate-anxious voters are feeling a major case of buyer’s remorse.”

Read more from Seth Klein:

When I’m not writing for PeaceQuest readers I work on federal health policy, and the Carney government’s incredibly tepid response to Alberta’s unprecedented health care privatization has been a top concern.

The Prime Minister’s strategy

Still, Doug Roche thinks that Carney is refusing to push back on Smith, because this is exactly what she wants him to do.

Roche agrees with those who say Danielle Smith would prefer if the prime minister was more confrontational. It would fit her narrative better. Instead, “Carney’s strategy is to show Albertans that cooperative federalism works,” says Roche.

Roche might be right, given that the separatists are livid with Premier Smith and calling for her ouster after announcing her confusing referendum. Smith is urging separatists to focus on winning the referendum – not kicking her out of office like every other Premier since Ralph Klein.

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Readers say Ottawa Treaty is major Canadian accomplishment

Last week we looked back at the famous Ottawa Treaty banning landmines. Overwhelmingly (91%) readers felt strongly that the Ottawa Treaty is a key part of Canada’s international accomplishments.

As Jim Carmichael said in the comments, banning landmines was and remains an urgent goal, and, “The partnership between the Canadian Government and the United Nations resulting in the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines, was thus a major achievement in the service of humanity.”

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The 29-year-old ban on landmines has been facing a premature midlife crisis lately.

“Despite the ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel which has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries…Lebanon moved forward with the ban on antipersonnel landmines,” said the Ottawa-based group Mines Action Canada in a statement, celebrating the new addition.

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Membership in the treaty seems to be a revolving door these days - some countries are coming in, while others are getting out.

In 2025, five NATO countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Finland) announced they were withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty, or as known by its official United Nations title, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.

Last year was pretty rough for the treaty. It was the first time any country quit the ban.

At the treaty’s 25^th anniversary celebrations held in Ottawa back in 2022, Ukraine’s Ambassador joined Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Minister Mélanie Joly to mark what some have called the most successful disarmament treaty of all time.

But less that three years later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree initiating his country’s withdrawal from the international treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.

The treaty prohibits leaving the treaty during armed conflict, so legally Ukraine is still a State Party to the Ottawa Treaty.

In all six cases, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the perceived threat that other countries along Russia’s Western border could face a similar fate was used to justify the return to using landmines.

Putin’s army has spread landmines widely in occupied Ukraine following the invasion, making the country one of the most mined on Earth. Russia, along with other major powers including the United States and China, never joined the landmine ban.

So when NATO members start pulling out of the treaty, what kind of message does that send to the rest of the world?

As to be expected, many pro-war analysts and military leaders have used the Russian invasion to argue for their countries to withdraw, too – and Canada is no exception.

They say that the world when the treaty was negotiated no longer exists. Using arguments that were echoed by Prime Minister Mark Carney in his famous Davos speech this year, one decried the landmine treaty was a relic of the past, “in an age of great power competition.”

The progress that the Ottawa Treaty has made in preventing terrible deaths and injuries from landmines, mostly inflicted upon civilians, is undeniable.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines’ Landmine Monitor 2025 says that 94 states have officially completed destruction of their stocks of antipersonnel mines, destroying a combined total of over 55 million antipersonnel landmines.

The Ottawa Treaty, as it’s often called because of the key role Canada played in the late 1990s bringing the treaty about, holds a special place of high-esteem in our collective memory – a time long ago when Canada was a leader internationally.

Drawing on this essential role, Mines Action Canada has called on Canada to speak up and engage with our allies in defence of the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines.

“Landmines are a weapon of choice for those like Russia and ISIS who want to terrorize civilians or a weapon of desperation for non-state actors with no other options,” said Erin Hunt, who heads the group. “The Baltic countries [leaving the treaty] are neither of those.”

“This Canadian success story has saved countless lives over the past 25 years and must stay strong to prevent future harm,” Erin added.

(The article has been updated regarding Ukraine’s legal status within the Treaty. My thanks to Mines Action Canada).

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Readers very concerned about U.S. interference in Canada

Last week’s newsletter looked at reports that both Russia and the United States are supporting Alberta separatists through online misinformation campaigns. The odd de facto collaboration to undermine Canada makes the two countries very strange bedfellows, which seems to be leaving “official Ottawa” unable to respond.

I asked you to choose which country; Russia, China or the United States, posed the greatest threat of foreign interference to Canada. Readers overwhelmingly chose the United States (96%).

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A new report says the Russians – and the Americans – are coming together to support the independence movement that is pushing for a referendum on Alberta leaving Canada.

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The study by leading information researchers says American and Russian actors are playing a dangerous role through disinformation and “fake news” delivered over social media, reports Global News.

“While homegrown, the movement has become an attractive target for foreign exploitation,” said the new study backed by five think tanks, including DisinfoWatch and the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience. “As they amplify separatist voices and normalize American annexation of Canada, these outside forces are posing a direct threat to Canada’s ‘democratic integrity.’”

Russians are covert – Americans are “in your face”

Russia’s interference supporting Alberta separatism is covert, using shadowy websites that create an echo chamber of disinformation. “Russian government strategy has long emphasized exploiting divisive issues within Western democracies,” says the report.

Meanwhile the Americans are much more bald-faced. “U.S. engagement is overt, escalating, and in some environments, converging with Russia,” the researchers found.

Separatists meeting with Trump administration

Senior U.S. figures in the Trump administration have met with Alberta separatist leaders several times, and endorsed their aims.

“We’re meeting very, very senior people leaving our meetings to go directly to the Oval Office,” claimed a member of Alberta Prosperity Project, a fringe right-wing group. One meeting was reportedly held in super-secure facility shielded from electronic eavesdropping.

“The U.S. is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” the group’s legal counsel, Jeff Rath, told the Financial Times after attending the meetings.

The group is openly seeking a $500-billion credit facility from the U.S. Treasury to help bankroll the new country if they come out victorious in a referendum.

American Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sparked excitement amongst Alberta separatists when he described the oil-rich province as “a natural partner for the U.S.” during an interview with right-wing streaming channel.

“The Albertans are very independent people,” Bessent said. “[There is a] rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not.”

U.S. influencers have amplified separatist and annexation narratives to audiences in the millions, say the researchers.

Watch comments by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

Privacy controversy

Alberta separatists submitted a petition this week signed by over 300,000 people triggering a referendum on Alberta’s future within Canada.

But their efforts came under a cloud after it was discovered petition organizers gained illegal access to a list of millions of Alberta voters – and posted it to a website. Were some of these names copied to the petition?

Former Premier and Harper-era Cabinet minister Jason Kenney, a frequent target of Alberta’s extreme right, was very alarmed to learn his personal information was shared widely – with no complaint from the Premier who’s staffer was aware of the data breach.

Ottawa unable to respond

Despite over a year of annexation threats against Canada from Trump, the Ottawa political establishment seems to be unable or unwilling to confront the American threat of interference in Canadian politics.

As PeaceQuest readers may recall, progressive voices such as Gordon Laxer and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May urged the government to examine threats from American oil interest as far back as February 2024. The government-sponsored Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference ignored them.

Little has changed since. For instance, the Senate Committee on National Security released a report just last week that fingered Russia as deliberately disseminating false information to Western audiences. But American interference was not addressed.

The Senators recommended the Government of Canada counter Russia through our involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Group of Seven, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance and other international entities.

But it’s our involvement in these U.S.-led security alliances that leaves us wide open to the Americans.

Prime Minister Carney knows this already. As he described in his now famous speech in Davos, our integration is a vulnerability to be exploited by the big powers.

“You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he said.

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Readers support buying Swedish jets over American

A majority of PeaceQuest readers (56%) say that Canada should replace its aging feet of CF-18 jets with new ones built by Sweden - not American-made F-35 stealth fighters.

Canada’s $28-billion F-35 program is under review, and readers say that Canada should go with the Gripen fighter being offered to Canada by Saab. The second most popular answer was “none of the above” (31%). One-in-ten (9%) say a mixed fleet of both F-35s and Gripens would be preferable.

Comments:

• “Any situation that involves dependence on the U.S. must be avoided, for obvious reasons.” – F. Brady

• “My choice was only to buy Gripens.” - M. Laroque

• “Why do we need fighter planes in the first place?” - S. Walke

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Now we know why. And the reason is a warning to Canada’s military pushing to buy a fleet of F-35s.

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It was late January, 2025 at the U.S. airbase in Fairbanks, Alaska, and four F-35 fighters were preparing for a training flight. It was about lunch time, and the air temperature was -18 Celsius. After a delay caused by – you guessed it – technical problems with the other planes, the four finally were cleared for take-off.

The pilot of the third plane ran into trouble immediately. The front landing gear of the F-35 would not retract fully, jamming at an odd angle. The pilot contacted the ground commander and the other pilots for help.

The pilot tried a number of switches, but the other planes confirmed the landing gear was still jammed. A series of highspeed turns, putting 2.5 times the pressure of gravity on the plane couldn’t shake it loose.

Finally, the commanding officer on the ground decided it was time to call “customer support” at the F-35’s manufacturer: Lockheed Martin.

A conference call was arranged between the F-35 pilot, ground control at the airbase, and 5 engineers working for Lockheed Martin in Texas.

For nearly an hour they painstakingly pored over the warning codes being generated by the aircraft’s complex computers, one by one, as the pilot circled overhead burning precious fuel. They could not figure out the problem.

Finally they decided to perform and incredibly risky maneuver called a touch-and-go.

The pilot approached the runway as if to land, touched the jammed landing gear on the ground to try to snap it into place, then climbed back into the sky. It didn’t work.

On a second try the pilot came in to land at an even higher speed and touched the landing gear on the ground again.

That’s when things went very wrong.

As the pilot pulled up with nose landing gear still jammed, the F-35’s controls went haywire. The plane tilted and dove uncontrollably – the pilot’s joystick stopped working properly, and the plane entered a fatal “stall” position where it can’t remain airborne.

The pilot ejected, and the F-35 dropped like a stone to the ground near the runway, exploding into a ball of flames. The dramatic crash was caught on video by people at the airbase and shared widely over social media.

Incredibly, two weeks later a second F-35 from the same airbase had a similar landing gear problem, but was able to land safely.

What went wrong?

The results of the crash investigation serve as a warning for the Royal Canadian Air Force and its pilots.

Improper handing of hydraulic fluid for the landing gear by U.S. military ground crew allowed water into the mixture, which froze in the sub-zero Alaska temperatures.

The primary cause of the crash was related to operating the F-35 in very cold temperatures, just like Canada’s fleet will have to perform in the North.

Perhaps even worse is that even the U.S. air force was incapable of fixing its complex jet itself, and had to call Lockheed Martin engineers (who still couldn’t fix it).

Oddly, during the 50-minute call the engineers in Texas never asked where the pilot was flying, and didn’t know the F-35 was in Alaska, according to the report.

When the pilot performed the second flyby and touched the ground with the jammed landing gear, the F-35’s complex computer thought the aircraft had actually landed, and switched into a ground-operating mode. “Control of the aircraft was not possible,” said the crash investigation report. The pilot was forced to eject twenty-six seconds later.

Lessons for Canada

Critics of the F-35 for Canada have long pointed out how Canada’s airforce will similarly be unable to maintain its own aircraft, and will be utterly reliant upon the U.S. Lockheed Martin corporation, which is under the control of President Trump.

If Canada goes through on its plan to buy 88 F-35s, will we become completely dependent – and vulnerable – on the United States to use them as we see fit (or not use them)?

The review of the F-35 purchase is overdue

After Trump’s tariffs and take-over threats, the Carney government initiated a review of the deal. Rival Swedish plane-maker Saab offered Canada its Gripen aircraft, which is much better suited to Arctic operations and does not need the Americans. Some have proposed Canada buying F-35s and Gripens, creating a mixed fleet of both aircraft.

Canadian Defence Minister David McGuinty told a Senate defence committee this week that Ottawa has not set a timeline for deciding whether to proceed with its $28 billion plan to acquire 88 F-35A Lightning II fighter jets. So far the government has only paid for 16 F-35s which are being built in Lockheed Martin’s factory in Texas.

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Readers hopeful Canada will become peace leader, once again

Last week I shared an appeal by prominent Canadians urging the Prime Minister to play a leadership role at the United Nations. Talks happening right now about the global nuclear disarmament agreement, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are at risk of sinking into disarray, opening the door to an uncertain nuclear future.

By far, most readers agree that Canada can still play a leading role on the global stage (84%). Some said they didn’t know or were unsure (13%), and a handful disagreed (3%).

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That’s how close we came to the first use of a nuclear weapon since 1945.

It was just a few years ago in September 2022, and Russian troops were being pushed back by Ukraine whose troops had launched a successful surprise incursion into Russia and captured territory.

Russians had threatened to use nuclear weapons in the past, but the West thought Putin was always bluffing. But not this time.

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The CIA informed U.S. President Joseph Biden that it had intercepted increasing chatter from Russian forces about the possibility of using smaller-scale “tactical” nuclear weapons.

The spy agency warned the President of a 50% chance or higher that Russia would reach for its nuclear arsenal if it found its forces were decimated.

Fortunately, frantic and forceful calls from the White House to the Kremlin had an effect. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping’s help was enlisted to persuade Putin to stand down.

A disastrous escalation to a nuclear conflict between superpowers was avoided.

As the Ukrainians were later forced to withdraw, the pressure to reach for “the button” receded.

President Biden shared publicly the harrowing nuclear close call a few weeks later.

Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis [in 1962],” the president added.

Trouble brewing at the United Nations?

If Prime Minister Mark Carney is correct and the previous World order governed by treaties and international law is over, then a bad situation may be unfolding in New York at the United Nations.

One of the last nuclear treaties signed by the big powers is under review next week. The UN calls the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (“proliferation,” meaning the increase or spread of nuclear weapons to other countries), or NPT, “an essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament,” and “the cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.”

The challenge is that each of the last two 5-year reviews of the NPT ended with a failure to reach a final agreed-upon statement.

Experts urging Ottawa to get off the sidelines

A group of Canadian “Who’s Who” – all recipients of the prestigious Order of Canada – have written the Prime Minister calling upon the Government of Canada to provide leadership for the NPT and nuclear disarmament efforts.

“This core treaty of nuclear governance is facing a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ result with possibly fatal effects for its authority. A rescue plan is sorely needed to salvage the treaty and prevent this dire outcome,” wrote the “Canadian Leadership for Nuclear Disarmament.” The letter was signed Lloyd Axworthy, Elizabeth May, and Allan Rock among others.

Prime Minister Mark Carney responds

The group released the Prime Minister’s reply to their urgent request on Friday. The response was only two paragraphs long, and despite its brevity, described their call for leadership as, “both timely and appreciated.” The Prime Minister said he had passed the correspondence to his Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The signers might take solace that the Prime Minister responded given the myriad challenges facing the country.

But unfortunately, expectations for anything resembling past Canadian diplomatic accomplishments (remember landmines?) have been turned into dust over the last generation of inaction.

Still, people like me who have spent much of their lives working for peace know that the challenge to avoid nuclear war, and abolish the bombs, is a multi-generational struggle that is passed on from our parents, and then to our children. It may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen.

We have been incredibly lucky for over 80 years, let’s hope it doesn’t run out next time.

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PeaceQuest added to Canadian Peace Museum collection

The Canadian Peace Museum being established in rural Bancroft, Ontario has added archives from the Kingston-based founders of PeaceQuest to its collection. You can access materials produced from 2012-2020 and a special site devoted to peace education called “War and Children” created by educators for teachers.

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Readers feel Pope Leo XIV has positive influence

Last week we dubbed Pope Leo the new “anti-Trump” when he spoke out passionately against the war on Iran, evoking the social media scorn of President Trump.

In an article that was one the most read and most engaged published by PeaceQuest recently, 95% of readers said, “Yes, the Pope can influence global affairs and promote peace.”

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“The Masters of War pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy!” he called to a roaring crowd in Cameroon. “Yet often a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild.”

Wow, it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

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“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” the leader of the Catholic Church said firmly.

“They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing, on devastation. Yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.”

The U.S.-born Pope Leo XIV was speaking in Africa – but we all know who he was talking about in America.

For days he has been the target of a barrage of insults from President Donald Trump after the Pope opposed the attack on Iran. The President accused the Pope of being weak and captive to the “radical left.” Trump event went so far as to post AI-generated images of himself as Jesus, healing the ill.

A group representing Catholic bishops across Canada spoke out against using images of Christ for political rhetoric as being, “disrespectful.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” Pope Leo responded.

The Pope says he will not change his message, despite strong opposition from the American administration.

“I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems,” Pope Leo said.

“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration.”

Until now Canada’s Mark Carney has been positioned as the intellectual counterweight to Trump and other authoritarians since the Prime Minister’s globally-celebrated speech in Davos.

But I think Mark Carney – who is quadrupling Canada’s military spending at the expense of social programs and health care – should heed the Pope’s criticism of war spending while so many people are in need.

Watch the video clip, or read the full text.

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Save a thought for Cuba

It’s been two months since we last looked at Cuba’s struggle under sanctions from the Trump administration.

Attention has been diverted to the Middle East, but the situation in Cuba has grown worse, my colleague at Common Frontiers tells me.

“Cuba needs access to fuel now. Power outages are constant,” she said. “The situation in hospitals is absolutely dire with medication shortages and decreased access to life-saving equipment.”

Nearly a million Canadians visit Cuba every year – the Caribbean island is close to our hearts and we have had a special, independent, relationship for decades.

Please add your name and send this message to the government urging immediate action to help the Cuban people.

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Readers divided on PM Carney’s handling of Iran war

The ceasefire in the Persian Gulf seems to be holding, thankfully, and Iran has reopened tanker traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Canada originally sided with the illegal U.S. attack on Iran, but managed to keep troops out of the conflict (so far).

PeaceQuest readers are roughly divided evenly over the PM’s handling of the conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran. Two-out-of-five (41%) said he has handled it well, while slightly more said he has not handled it well (49%).

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