Dear Editor:
The Harper government has tried to disguise the militarization of Canada from peacekeeper to powder monkey under the guise of self-defence (against whom I don't know). We have become a nation in lockstep with our neighbours to the south.
The wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are unconscionable. These so-called regime changes have been based on hyperbole, speculation and outright lies.
Adding insult to injury, while much has been raised about poverty, we seem to have no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars for war. Although there was unanimous agreement, we failed to carry out a parliamentary commitment to end child poverty by 2000. Today, child poverty is much worse. We are literally sacrificing the security and health of Canadians for guns.
Outside of death, misery, environmental and infrastructure destruction abroad, what is it costing us at home?
As former U.S. president and Second World War General Eisenhower put it: "Every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists and the hopes of its children."
This government is going to spend $70 billion on weapons such as F-35 fighter bombers and warships in the next several years.
The Afghan War alone will cost us over $22 billion when all the bills are paid, according to David Perry of the Dalhousie University Centre of Foreign Policy Studies.
To put it another way, the cost of 65 F-35 fighter jets at $16 billion (at present, it is estimated that the actual cost of these jets will be about $30 billion) could be better spent on 30,000 homes ($6 billion), tuition fees for 50,000 students ($1 billion), clean water in aboriginal communities ($1 billion), a national child-care program ($5 billion), 5,000 transit buses ($2.5 billion), and humanitarian assistance to disaster areas such as Haiti and Pakistan ($500 million). That is only based on $16 billion.
The Centre for Social Justice in Toronto pointed out some time ago that the military spending in 2002/03 of $12.3 billion could, for example, have provided at that time a national pharmacare program ($500 million), 20,000 new social housing units ($2 billion), infrastructure, i.e. water systems and public transit, etc., and create 6,000 jobs ($4 billion), implement the Romanow Commission's recommendations and restore the federal share of health-care funding to 25 per cent ($6 billion per year).
The point of all this is, why do we have untold billions for war and its weapons to murder and destroy other people 12,000 miles away who are not and never have been a threat or danger to us?
Why do we, like puppets, follow the Americans around the world in one socalled regime change (war of aggression) after another?
The destructive economic and social costs of war both at home and abroad can only be described as tragic.
It's time to bring the troops home and re-engage them in the U.N. peacekeeping that Canada was noted and respected for worldwide.
The majority of Canadians want this, and our elected representatives should have the guts to demand it.
It is hypocrisy to suggest that these wars are about democracy and freedom.
Where are democracy and freedom when untold millions of civilians are killed and displaced, their homes and infrastructure trashed, "bombed into the Dark Ages," as one American general put it?
And, at home, there is no democracy when people are poor and unemployed. There is no freedom when people are homeless and hungry.
Bill Zander, New Westminster
