A glimpse inside PM Carney's arms bazaar
Robot dogs, rocket launchers, and a standing ovation for the Prime Minister
CBC’s Front Burner just dropped a two-part documentary worth every PeaceQuest reader’s time.
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.
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.
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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.”
