Canada has responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s filing last week of a proper application for his country’s admission to NATO by urging Kiev’s prompt incorporation into the aggressive US-led military alliance. Ottawa has been joined on this by a cabal of essentially the most belligerent Eastern European states, including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Speaking in Washington alongside US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on September 30, just hours after the Ukraine application was announced, Canadian Foreign Minster Mélanie Joly declared, “We consider that Ukraine must be a part of NATO. It has been our position for now greater than a decade, and we consider within the ‘Open Door’ policy.”
Blinken was somewhat more circumspect. He emphasized that there may be an admission “process” for would-be NATO states to follow, while adding “NATO’s door will remain open, including for Ukraine.”
The fact is Ukraine is already functioning as an arm of NATO, above all, Washington. The US and its NATO allies, Canada included, have poured tens of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry into Ukraine for the reason that outbreak of the war last February; and the Pentagon, as has been publicly admitted, is providing Ukrainian forces with strategic and tactical support, including the intelligence and weapons to focus on Russian generals.
That said, Joly’s remarks underscore the utter recklessness of Canadian imperialism and its NATO allies. At the same time as they’re forced to concede there may be a growing danger the Ukraine war will escalate right into a nuclear conflict, they’re ratcheting up pressure on Russia and threatening a wider war.
Ukraine’s integration into NATO would immediately transform the war right into a direct military conflict between the Western imperialist powers and Russia. Not only would Ukraine invariably invoke NATO’s Article 5 under which all member states are obliged to defend any NATO member under attack. Biden has repeatedly vowed that the US will defend “every inch” of NATO territory.
Joly’s blithe indifference to the danger that an all-out NATO-Russia conflict would pose for the peoples of Europe, North America and the world could be very much in line with the NATO powers’ insistence that the specter of the war turning nuclear must not be allowed to interfere with their plans to inflict a decisive defeat on Russia.
The reactionary nationalist Putin regime has responded to Russia’s mounting military debacle in Ukraine by making repeated threats that, if needed, it is going to use nuclear weapons to counter what it considers an existential threat. To this, government and military officials in Washington, Berlin, London, Paris and Ottawa have uniformly responded by vowing that the war with Russia have to be intensified.
Underscoring that discussions are well advanced among the many imperialist powers on how they might respond if the Putin regime deployed nuclear weapons, Joly responded to a CBC interviewer’s query on what Canada would do by saying, “This can be a decision we’ll take amongst the G-7.” She added ominously that Canada is preparing for all eventualities.
In declaring her support for Ukraine’s admission into NATO, Joly praised the rapid steps taken to make Sweden and Finland full NATO members after the 2 Scandinavian countries filed formal applications in May. She noted that they’re each Arctic powers and sit on the Arctic Council. The Canadian government clearly sees a possibility to take advantage of NATO’s expansion to more aggressively pursue its territorial and geostrategic interests within the Arctic, yet one more critical theater within the developing great power conflict. The opening up of the Far North sea lanes as a consequence of climate change and the upcoming prospect of the disappearance of sea ice is creating latest opportunities for the main powers to take advantage of latest trade routes and the Arctic’s large deposits of oil, gas and rare earth elements. Canada’s primary rival within the region is Russia.
Joly’s unvarnished support for Ukraine’s accession to NATO reveals Canadian imperialism’s true colors. From the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Canada’s ruling elite for self-serving, pragmatic reasons solid itself as a “peacekeeping” nation. This position, which was made possible by the postwar restabilization of capitalism, became untenable after the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union within the early Nineties, which opened up a latest period of unrestrained imperialist military violence.
US imperialism launched into three many years of uninterrupted wars within the Middle East and Central Asia because it desperately sought to offset its economic decline through military force. Canada joined these bloody interventions as one in every of Washington’s closest allies, while staunchly supporting the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders. Ottawa played a crucial role in triggering the present conflict with Russia, as shown by the Canadian military’s extensive involvement in restructuring the Ukrainian army and integrating fascist paramilitaries into its regular fighting force between 2014 and 2022.
The aggressive role that Canada is playing in Ukraine was driven home in a caucus meeting of the governing Liberals last week. Echoing the war hysteria that has gripped the ruling elites in every imperialist country, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland crowed, “[W]hat we must do is double down on our support for Ukraine.” Freeland, because the World Socialist Web Site has documented elsewhere, embodies the decades-long alliance between the Canadian state and the Ukrainian far right.
The Trudeau government responded to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement last week of the annexation of territories in eastern and southern Ukraine by repeating its vow that Canada will assist Ukraine in “liberating” all its territories, including Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It also imposed one other round of sanctions, including on 43 “oligarchs” and 35 Russian-backed officials within the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. This brings the variety of Russian affiliated individuals and entities targeted by Canadian sanctions to over 1,400 for the reason that starting of the war.
On the military front, Canada continues to ship vast amounts of apparatus to Ukraine. In a recent interview with the CBC, Defence Minister Anita Anand revealed that Canada has shipped greater than 4 million kilos of cargo to Ukraine for the reason that spring. Much of the equipment has been funneled through a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) hub in Prestwick, Scotland, an airport that was once a transfer point for victims of CIA “extraordinary rendition.” In line with Anand, at the least three Canadian CC-130 Hercules transport aircraft are running weapons and supplies to Ukraine.
Sources told the CBC that Ukraine has written to the Canadian government with requests for significantly more military aid. Canada’s military contribution alone has surpassed $626 million since January, including tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, anti-tank weapons just like the Carl Gustav, 39 General Dynamics Super Bison light armoured vehicles, 4 M777 howitzers with 10 alternative barrels and tens of 1000’s of rounds of 155mm ammunition. The federal government has been tight-lipped about much of the help. In a single example of this, a defence source told the CBC earlier this yr that GPS precision-guided M982 Excalibur shells have been quietly provided to Ukraine.
Along with materiel support, Canada has secretively dispatched Special Forces to coordinate the fighting on the bottom in Ukraine, a fact only revealed months later in a July Latest York Times article. Operation UNIFIER, the operation to coach Ukrainian military personnel, recommenced on August 25 in Britain. Over 33,000 have been trained by the mission since September 2019, with only a transient pause through the initial stages of the war. Late last yr, it was revealed that Canadian forces had trained members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and deliberately sought to cover it up.
The political establishment, from the “left” Latest Democrats and pro-Quebec independence Bloc Québécois to the Conservatives, all support continuing to pour gasoline on the fireplace by increasing weapons deliveries still further.
Bob Rae, the erstwhile NDP premier of Ontario, interim leader of the federal Liberals (2011-13) and current Canadian Ambassador to the UN, urged the Trudeau government to provide Ukraine anything it asks for. Commenting on the Ukrainian government’s letter asking for more weapons, Rae said in an interview with CBC radio, “We’ve to maintain on pushing since the test of our success is … are we meeting the needs that can allow Ukraine to realize the objectives which it has, and admittedly which we share?”
With the complete support of its trade union allies, the Latest Democratic Party (NDP) responded to the outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war over Ukraine by negotiating a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with the Trudeau Liberals in March to ensure “stability”—that’s, the suppression of the category struggle on behalf of Canadian imperialism. Under the agreement, the NDP has pledged to supply the minority Liberal government a parliamentary majority through June 2025. The Liberals and NDP have used this majority to vastly expand the financial resources flowing to the military. The 2022 budget provided a further $8 billion in defence spending on top of the large hikes already introduced as a part of the Liberals’ 2017 defence policy review.
As well as, the Trudeau government has announced plans to spend $40 billion over the following 20 years on upgrading the North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) bilateral command with the USA, which is seen as critical for waging war with Russia and China. The modernization plans will facilitate Canada’s participation within the US ballistic missile defence shield, which despite its name is geared toward making a nuclear war waged by US imperialism “winnable.”
The company-controlled media is wholeheartedly supporting the escalation of the war with Russia by producing an uninterrupted stream of warmongering, anti-Russian bile. Andrew Coyne, a number one Globe and Mail columnist, blurted out the imperialists’ determination to bring about “regime change” in Russia as a part of their push to dismember the country and seize control of its natural resources. Entitled “There may be no end to this war that leaves Putin in power,” Coyne’s column revived the false Manichean Cold War narrative of a world divided between the “rational” and “democratic” West and the vainglorious, deceitful Russians. “The West’s war goals in the beginning,” wrote Coyne, “were limited to raising the price of Russian aggression, or perhaps containing its advance. Our aim must now be, not only victory in Ukraine, but regime change in Russia.”
