We’re still a client state, we just pay more

RE: More muscle in our military (June 12)

No, Canada is not marching in the right direction! U.S. President Donald Trump demanded NATO members shoulder heavier financial burdens, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tag team of Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan rushed to comply. Already, Canada is 16th in the world in military expenditures. The proposed 70 per cent jump in military spending could be better used for underfunded social programs helping rank-and-file Canadians instead of lining the pockets of arms manufacturers.

More importantly, your editorialist is dead wrong about threats to Canada. Threats to “global order” over Ukraine, Syria, and North Korea, emanate not from Russia and China, but rather from Washington, London, and Paris.

If the Trudeau government is really interested in developing an independent foreign policy, it should quit NATO, whose raison d’etre expired upon the dissolution of the USSR. That alliance drew Canada into every recent war of the U.S. empire: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Freeland said Canada needed a more robust military to project its “hard power” around the world. Otherwise, she said we would be just a “client state.”

Yet Canada was one of the few countries at the United Nations last October opposing a resolution for complete nuclear disarmament because, as a NATO member, our government is obliged to support nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

So, under Trudeau, we continue to be a U.S. client state. We just have to pay more for the status.

Where are the opposition parties and the NDP leadership candidates on this important question? Ken Stone, Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War