Yahoo Finance William Watson: In this world, a farewell to the arms industry just isn’t on
The truly extraordinary thing about the D-Day landings, though somehow it wasn’t emphasized in the wall-to-wall coverage of the commemorations, was how those brave young Canadian boys sprinting across Juno Beach and throwing themselves at the German positions did the whole heroic tour de force without weapons. What superhuman bravery!
Oh, I’m sorry. I see here in Wikipedia that many of our soldiers actually did use weapons. Rifles. Machine guns. Bazookas. Hand grenades. Howitzers. Heavy artillery. Knives. Bayonets. Not to mention tanks and airplanes, including 2,200 Allied bombers to soften up Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. And a number of ships were involved, too: five battleships, 20 cruisers and 65 destroyers, part of a flotilla of, though this surely can’t be right, 6,939 vessels.
Isn’t that interesting? We’re Canadian, after all. We have a well-known aversion to weapons. Our House of Commons recently voted against weapon sales to Israel because, though Israel is our ally, too many people were dying in its war of self-defence with Hamas, which many of our MPs think has become too much an offensive war, even if one of the best self-defence strategies is to be so effective offensively that your enemy gives up, which Israel’s so far not doing.
And though we do like to celebrate our past military glories, including being the third Allied power on D-Day, with responsibility for our very own beach (named, not for the Alaskan city of Juno but for the wife, with that nickname, of a Royal Air Force Wing Commander), if you check out our ranking in NATO, the alliance that emerged after WWII, you will find us, let’s see, running my finger down the list, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, yes, 25th among the 30 powers, just behind Italy, just ahead of Slovenia, in terms of military spending as a per cent of GDP. And I suppose some of the 1.38 per cent of our GDP that does go to the military may be for firefighting. Not firefights, mind you, but firefighting. As in keeping forests from burning. And some of it finances sandbagging, not for embattlements, but to keep people’s basements dry during flood seasons. Good cause. But probably doesn’t worry Vladimir Putin.
These days many Canadians don’t want us to have anything to do with weapons. University activists insist university investments (almost an oxymoron, given universities’ current financial state) not go to companies that make weapons or to indexes that invest in such companies.
Opposition to a new graphite mine in the Laurentians north of Montreal was usual for this sort of thing, merely hysterical, when the purpose was just to make batteries, but now that it has been revealed the U.S. Department of Defense has an interest in the project, activism is about to become apocalyptic. Although many Quebecers serve in the Armed Forces, the province has a decided pacifist streak. Where do you suppose an independent Quebec would lie on the NATO expenditure list? Vying with Luxembourg for last place, I should think. What will Donald Trump make of that? Or any U.S. president who understands that Trumpism will need to be mollified for some years to come.
The fact is the world remains a dangerous place, filled with dangerous, aggressive characters. Canada does remain splendidly isolated (if you don’t count the bits, actually quite a lot of it, that can be accessed by foreign computers). But, unlike the Americans, we think of ourselves as engaged, involved, committed, responsibly globally-minded, never isolationist. And yet we step up to our obligations with a decidedly ambivalent view of hard power and its uses. Our political left believes the Americans use hard power too much, which may well be true, and concludes that we should never use it at all. And so we don’t really need weapons. Or a military.
People not on the hard left have no predisposition against an effective Canadian fighting force but far too often see it mainly as an economic milch cow. The blue-chip Conseil des relations internationales de Montréal recently offered a lunchtime talk by Defence Minister Bill Blair on the subject of getting involved in the defence of Canada — a good subject for a defence minister. Except he was accompanied by the ubiquitous François-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science and industry. And the pitch for the session was, roughly translated, “Investment in defence in coming years is an interesting tool for economic growth. What we’ve done in batteries and electric vehicles we can also do in the defence sector.” Ka-ching, ka-ching.
As an economist, I’m hardly opposed to people making profits. But when the government runs the military half as industrial policy, and spends tens of billions of dollars, not to produce the most lethal and dangerous fighting force possible, but to satisfy minister-industrialists’ visions of how to build a leading-edge new economy, one also larded over with the porcine requirements of successful electoral politics, it is hard to believe whatever emerges will deter actual or potential enemies.
If Canadian boys, and now girls, too, running across beaches under enemy fire have only our military’s great economic multiplier statistics to fire back with, well, God help them — and also damn us for letting that happen.
Financial Post
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