By Dennis Gruending

Richard Sanders described it as a “David and Goliath” contest. On one side, Canada’s military and weapons contractors (they prefer to call themselves the defence and security industry), along with Ottawa’s mayor, the bureaucracy and most city councillors. On the other side, a small and loosely organized group of citizens drawn from perennially under-funded church and peace groups, including one called the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT), to which Mr. Sanders belongs. The trip wire was the City of Ottawa’s decision to turn its back on a 20-year-old ban against allowing war-related trade shows to occur on municipal property. The recent debate has pulled back a curtain on Canada’s military-industrial complex – it exports weapons and components that are ultimately used to kill people in foreign wars and other conflicts.

The ban regarding military trade shows on city property was passed by a previous and arguably more enlightened city council in 1989 by a vote of 11 to one. But this year in a neat bit of sophistry, staff advised that the ban no longer applied because the city had undergone various amalgamations and boundary changes. The city was no longer the city, as it were. So it was that a military exhibit called CANSEC 2009 was held on May 27 and 28 at Lansdowne Park, a location that normally hosts home shows, hockey games and a farmers’ market. Security was tight during CANSEC and members of the public were not allowed to attend the event. An ad hoc citizens’ group did demonstrate in the rain at the entrance to Lansdowne and held an evening vigil in a nearby United Church, but to no avail.

CADSI receives government money

CANSEC is the organizational child of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), is a lobby group representing hundreds the country’s largest weapons producers and exporters of military equipment. CADSI describes itself much more benignly on its website as “a not-for-profit business association that represents 800 domestically-based, world-leading, technology-oriented companies…” The organization receives money from the federal government for its activities and about 200 CADSI exhibitors were on hand in to display their wares for potential buyers at the CANSEC event.

An Ottawa Citizen article about the show was accompanied by a photo of a Danish soldier perched in the turret of a CV90 armoured troop carrier built by a Canadian-based company called BAE Systems. The photo’s cutline said that BAE hoped its product “would interest buyers.” Another article in a publication called Flightglobal.com reported that an Ottawa-based company called Gastops held a signing ceremony at CANSEC to celebrate its agreement to sell components to Pratt & Whitney for a plane called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Debate at city council

On June 2, after CANSEC had ended, the action shifted to city council where Councillor Alex Cullen introduced a motion at the economic affairs committee that would have re-established the ban against arms shows on city property. More than 60 people came out to speak, most of them in favour of restablishing the ban. The committee voted against re-instating the ban and then voted in favour of another explicit motion that will allow CANSEC to use Lansdowne Park again in 2010. The question will now move onto the full council.

Ottawa’s mayor Larry O’Brien normally chairs the economic affairs committee but he was absent. He has had to step down temporarily while he defends himself in court against allegations that he is guilty of attempted bribery and influence peddling in convincing a competitor to drop out of the mayoralty race in 2006. The mayor, however, publicly endorsed CANSEC 2009 and was immediately accused of being in a conflict of interest. O’Brien is the founder of Calian Technologies, a company that belongs to CANSI and also has contracts with the U.S. military. O’Brien has continued to hold shares in Calian and chose to remain on the company’s board of directors after winning the mayoralty. A Calian subsidiary, SED Systems, exhibited at CANSEC 2009.

Pesky questions

CANSEC’s promoters were assiduous in attempting to cast their event as a mere trade and technology show, but the pesky citizens’ group and others are asking some blunt questions. Do Canadian-based companies build weapons and\or components for fighter jets, bombers, attack helicopters and tanks? The answer is yes but it is difficult to get anyone at CADSI to admit it. The second question is whether those weapons or components are provided solely to the Canadian military, or exported to other countries.

The answer is that companies belonging to CADSI sell billions of dollars worth of military equipment to both the Canadian military and to foreign customers. The final, and obvious, conclusion to be drawn is that the weapons are used to kill people — those considered to be enemy combatants, but civilians as well.

Industry spokespersons are adept at avoiding just those kinds of questions. A CADSI news release issued on May 27 (during the CANSEC exhibit) quoted Tim Page, CADSI’s president, as saying: “The technologies on display here today provide leading edge equipment and services to allow our paramedics, firefighters, police officers and military personnel to carry out their responsibilities more effectively and safely – helping them do their jobs and save lives.” Page sent on to say that many of the innovations unveiled at CANSEC over the years such as alarm systems, can be found in homes across Canada. No doubt many of the CANSEC exhibitors do produce products for civilian use – but they also produce weapons and components and they export them.

Pointy end of the stick

The words weapons or war are not mentioned in CADSI promotional material either, but CADSI’s Mr. Page was somewhat more explicit when he appeared before city councillors, urging them to defeat the motion requesting a ban on military related shows. The Ottawa Citizen quoted him as saying: “[CANSEC] is a very technology-oriented show with lots of software applications, simulation and training presentations … but the pointy-end of the stick is part of the arsenal required to protect, defend and promote Canadian values and interests.”

The arms show occurred against a backdrop of Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan and CADSI attempts to exploit that reality. Page was quoted as saying, “It is essential that when we ask men and women in uniform to put themselves in harm’s way that we do so by ensuring they have the best possible equipment and training available to them.” Canadians, of course, do want to protect their soldiers, 120 of whom have lost their lives in Afghanistan – although it is, at the same time, perfectly legitimate to challenge the decisions of our government to send and keep them there. The citizen’s group opposing CANSEC’s exhibition at Lansdowne Park introduced another perspective by providing a message from Malalai Joya, a female member of Afghanistan’s parliament. She sent, via email, a deeply disturbing set of pictures of Afghan children, most of them from her region, who have been killed and horribly maimed in NATO bombing raids. She asked if any of these weapons had their origin in Canada.

Canada as arms exporter

Resarch provided by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade indicates that Canada is the world’s seventh largest arms exporter. Canada military exports totaled more than $5.6 billion  between 2003 and 2005. Of the 73 countries that received these exports, 39 had troops that were engaged in major military conflicts, either at home or abroad. The Canadian arms industry is closely integrated with that of the United States. Canadian-based companies supply weapons and components to the Americans, who either use them or provide them to other countries. The U.S. was the recipient of 70 per cent of Canadian military exports between 2003 and 2005, at a value of approximately $4 billion.

Richard Sanders says, “Ninety percent of the CANSEC 2009 military trade show exhibitors — the data is available from Industry Canada — report that they do export their products.”  He says that by researching the websites of Canadian-based companies exhibiting at CANSEC he was able to produce detailed information about Canadian military hardware that is embedded in approximately 40 U.S. weapons systems being used in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. These weapons include the lethal A-10 Thunderbolt airplane, the AC 130 Spectre gunship, the AH 64 Apache attack gunship, a light armoured vehicle made by General Dynamics in London Ontario, and missiles and warheads made by Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg.

Conversion

Sanders says that in recent years CADSI has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).  The grants are part of the government’s Program for Export Marketing Development and were specifically designed to assist CADSI in its efforts to promote international trade, and the international business development activities of its member corporations. CANSEC is the major annual event organized by CADSI. Sanders says that export data obtained online from Industry Canada also indicates that most of CANSEC 2009’s approximately 200 exhibitors report that they do indeed export their products.

CADSI’s trump argument revolves around money and jobs. The organization’s website claims that its member companies provide 70,000 Canadian jobs and $10 billion in economic activity. It’s a strategic and probably effective argument, particularly during a recession that has thrown more than 400,000 Canadians out of work since October 2008. It is a point that has been emphasized in letters to the editor and columns in Ottawa newspapers. But the same argument could be made (and has been) to support the tobacco and asbestos industries, not to mention gambling, prostitution, and even the cultivation of drug bound poppy crops. The solution proposed for those industries is conversion. It’s a good word.

By Dennis Gruending

Douglas Roche reminds me of Emmett Hall. I published a biography in 1985 called Emmett Hall: Establishment Radical about the Supreme Court judge whose royal commission recommended Medicare for Canada in 1964. Hall was comfortable in the hallways of power but he was also a social reformer who used his position for public good rather than private gain. He was social Catholic, someone influenced by the teaching of his church as outlined in various papal encyclicals that defended private property but also supported labour unions and moderate reform. Prior to being appointed a judge, Hall had been a Diefenbaker supporter in Saskatchewan and saw himself as a Red Tory – a political species that is now close to extinction in Canada.

Roche’s varied career in public service is quite different from Hall’s but he does exhibit many of the same characteristics. Roche, who is in his 80th year, was born into a staunchly Catholic Irish family in the Ottawa Valley. Hall was born into a similarly devout Irish Catholic family in Quebec but the Halls moved to Saskatchewan in 1910. Hall studied law and practiced in Saskatoon for many years. He was involved in various communities – as a Catholic hospital board member, a separate school trustee, a prominent member of the bar association and a Conservative.

Roche went to college in Ottawa and then into secular journalism but soon offered his services to Catholic newspapers in Canada and later in the United States. He was, like many Catholics of his generation, inspired by Vatican II, the church council that occurred between 1962 and 1965. It was intended to empower the laity and to bring the church into a dialogue with the modern world. Roche returned from the U.S. to become editor of the Western Catholic Reporter in 1965 and he was working in that capacity when he was approached on behalf of Robert Stanfield to become a Conservative candidate in the 1972 federal election. He was to spend 12 years in the House of Commons before being named Canada’s disarmament ambassador at the United Nations. He did not seek a second five-year ambassadorial term in 1989, due mainly to his disappointment over the Mulroney government’s allowing U.S. cruise missile testing over Canadian territory. In 1999, Jean Chretien appointed Roche to the Senate, where he sat as an Independent until his retirement in 2004.

Roche has written or participated in 19 books, an impressive feat given his many professional and family responsibilities. His latest offering is called Creative Dissent: A Politician’s Struggle for Peace. It is at once a personal, political and diplomatic memoir and in the hands of a talented, if unadorned writer, it is a significant cut above the usual “told-to” memoirs of many retired politicians. I called Roche recently to talk to him about the book and the appearance that he will make to promote it in Ottawa on December 4th.

Roche is best known as a crusader for peace and disarmament but it was only later in his parliamentary career that the peace theme emerged strongly. “I went into politics with the theme of social justice in mind domestically and internationally,” Roche says, “but actually in my first years in parliament I was, of necessity, more taken up with domestic and constituency issues.” Yet his interest in international issues was always there. “I did not see them so much as peace issues at first but rather as issues of social justice and development. Pope Paul VI said that development is the new name for peace. I began to see that disarmament and peace were essential for social justice to occur.”

There is also in Roche’s book an undercurrent of disappointment with the political system. I asked if he pursued his speaking, writing, travelling out of some frustration with the limitations imposed upon him as an opposition MP. “I went into politics to extend social justice,” he says. “It is true that in an opposition party there was no great interest in these matters. So I tried to find an outlet for my convictions about social justice. It was the circumstances in which I found myself that determined my actions.”

I asked him what he sees as the main impediments to social justice, peace and disarmament. “Our political system is so short sighted,” he says. “Governments are shallow in their thinking about the trend lines on issues such as the environment and spending on arms.” Roche has the scars to prove that advancing this agenda in political and diplomatic circles is not easy. “There is this idea,” he says, “that anyone who works in these areas is a fuzzy headed idealist and the other people are realists, and you are marginalized for your ostensible idealism. I would argue that the realists are actually those people recognize that the status quo is not sustainable and are looking for answers to the over arching issues of our time. These are the nuclear arms race and climate change.”

I asked about what he sees as signs of hope. He says there were positive moves between 1995 and 2000 to extend the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to take practical steps toward abolishing nuclear weapons. “There were signs that we were coming down from the nuclear mountain,” he says. “Then George W. Bush was elected and it’s been downhill ever since.” Roche says, however, that president-elect Obama has promised to centre U.S. policy on the abolition of nuclear weapons. “I believe that the net is closing on those who want to keep nuclear weapons. I am expressing a view that there is an historical momentum here. I do not forget the forces arraigned against us in the military-industrial complex. They are very powerful but then slavery, colonialism and apartheid were all overcome when a critical mass of people decided that change was needed. So, too, it will be with nuclear weapons although it may not be in my lifetime.”

Roche confronts his own mortality (his first wife Eva died in 1995) and he looks ahead to future generations. “I sigh not for the past but cry for the future,” he writes in his book. “It is not my lost youth that I pine for but a lost future for my grandchildren.” He admits that he feels “some sense of outrage” because the kind of Canada that he wanted and represented does not seem to be there now. He knows only one way to deal with both frustration and hope, and ends his final chapter in the book with the words that one assumes are his motto — Never Quit.

Roche will be in Ottawa to speak about his book on Thursday, December 4, 7:30 p.m. at Southminster United Church, 15 Aylmer Avenue, (at Bank & the Canal).  Former Prime Minister Joe Clark will introduce him. For more information:  613-730-6874 or suc@rogers.com.

By Dennis Gruending

He would be called an icon if he was in business, sports or even politics but in the world that he inhabits 85-year-old peace activist Murray Thomson is just quietly and deeply respected. This night he speaks about militarism to a group of about 50 people at the modest Quakers House in Ottawa as part of a two-week peace festival. There is a video and some music provided by a middle-aged group who (tongue-in-cheek) call themselves Grateful We’re Not Dead — but Thomson’s 15-minute speech is the centrepiece. “Militarism is bad for the global economy, terrible for the environment, hugely destructive of human rights and of life itself, and it poses a major risk to the future of humanity,” Thomson says.

He has a deeper appreciation than most about both the attraction and repulsion of militarism. He was a student at the University of Toronto when the Second World War began. He enlisted in the air force and became a pilot although he never actually flew a combat mission. He was still in the military when, in 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. “Hiroshima made me a pacifist,” Thomson told Embassy magazine in June 2008, and now, 63 years after that unspeakably violent event, he is still spreading the word about resisting militarism and building peace.

Militarism, Thomson says, is fed by the recruitment and training of armed forces, nourished by military alliances, such as NATO, and supported by the well-funded secret intelligence agencies. “Militarism grows in a social climate characterized by nationalism, patriotism, denigration of women and an over-emphasis on authority, buttressed by attitudes which stress the perversity and weakness of human nature. Militarism is fostered by economic, political and military interest groups which benefit materially from the arms trade.” Canada, for example, plans to spend $490 billion on the military over the next 20 years, and the U.S. spends $700 billon each year. Thomson says the tentacles of the defence establishment and its lobby are everywhere and that militarism is deeply etched into our individual and collective consciousness.

Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND), he says, spends millions of dollars on think tanks and scholars and in return expects them to provide supportive commentary. Citing research by University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, Thomson says that eleven universities receive between $580,000 and $780,000, and Queens University obtained a grant of $1.5 million. “He [Attaran] claims that DND sponsors policy scholars who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians’ perceptions of the military and war.”

Militarism is also associated with the acceptance of violence in films and videos, and our use of language in sports and other community events, Thomson says. “Who of us is not embarrassed by the rants of Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada, the champion of both hockey brawling and a tougher military?” Many professional sports teams “use military terms to describe and promote their activities and at last year’s football final in Toronto, the Grey Cup was brought into the Rogers Centre by the Canadian military. It could be seen, riding on a tank, followed by a recruitment detachment from DND.”

Thomson may be discouraged but he is not deterred. He has been an active pacifist and remains so. He’s worked for the Quakers and internationally for CUSO. He was the co-founder of the inter-church peace group Project Ploughshares, a founder of Peace Brigades International and of Peace Fund Canada, a campaign aimed at allowing conscientious objectors to have their tax payments spent only for non-military purposes. For his unceasing efforts, he has received the Order of Canada, the Pearson Peace Medal and other awards.

Thomson provides his Quaker House audience with a checklist of practical ways to challenge militarism. They include:

- Keep on doing what we are doing. Work to rid the world of weapons: land mines, cluster bombs, automatic weapons, arms technology or weapons of mass destruction.

- Ask questions of academic presidents about the research done because of grants received from the Department of National Defence.

- Advocate for a [Canadian] Department of Peace which puts peace, the environment and disarmament priorities into foreign policy and seeks to train thousands of youth and others in conflict resolution, in Canada or elsewhere.

- Campaign to end the war in Afghanistan and to support war resisters seeking to live Canada.

- Support couragaeous Africans seeking to end civil conflicts in their countries, or Israelis and Palestinians seeking a just solutions to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East.

- Keep on working to creating global structures that strengthen international law and human rights.

- Challenge NATO’s nuclear policies and the existence of NATO itself.

- Find the means to coordinate efforts, pool financial, human and spiritual resources and speak with one voice.

Then, having delivered his speech, Murray Thomson picks up a fiddle and plays a tune along with the evening’s entertainers. All they are saying was give peace a chance.

By Dennis Gruending

 John Dear, an American Jesuit priest and peace activist, gave an uncompromising address on non-violence to about 120 people in an Ottawa church basement on August 22. “Violence doesn’t work,” he said. “War doesn’t work. War is not the will of God. War is never justified. Peaceful means are the only way ahead.”  The message was stark in its clarity: there is no excuse for violence — ever; no just war theory; no supporting a war to end all wars. Rev. Dear has been arrested over 75 times in acts of non-violent civil disobedience for peace, has organized hundreds of demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons at military bases across the U.S. and worked to stop the death penalty. He is also the author/editor of 25 books on peace and non-violence. Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Dear spoke at St. Joseph’s Parish in Ottawa on a Friday evening, and then left for the Galilee Centre in nearby Arnprior to lead a weekend retreat on non-violence. He reminded those in his Ottawa audience that it was 45 years ago (on August 28, 1963) when Martin Luther King Jr led 200,000 people in a non-violent civil rights rally in Washington D.C., and 40 years ago that King was shot to death while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Dear said that King’s last publicly spoken words were: “The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is between non-violence and non-existence.”

“The world is a mess,” Dear said. “There are 35 wars going on right now. There are 20,000 nuclear weapons and no significant peace movement. The U.S. is building state of the art nuclear weapons and the Pentagon is itching to use them. In the American church we have developed a spirituality of violence and war. In Los Alamos, New Mexico the people who the build nuclear weapons actually believe that they are the peacemakers and our priests bless the bombs.”

“Martin Luther King was hopeful at the edge of despair,” Dear said, “and we have to do this as well. Non-violence is not only a strategy; it is a way of life. There is no cause for which we will support the taking of a human life. We are willing to take on suffering in this struggle without a trace of retaliation. It’s called the cross. We really have to work on inner non-violence. The starting point is in our heart, it is our doorway to peace and non-violence.”

Dear said that the future of the movement must be inter-faith. “Non-violence is the common ground of all religions. Jesus said love your enemy. He was meticulously non-violent but he was not passive, and if you are his follower you are non-violent. It is as simple as that.”

Dear concluded with a how-to list regarding non-violence:

- Be contemplatives of non-violence. Spend time every day with God, giving up your violence and anger so that you have something else to offer. “Radiate the peace personally that you want politically.”

- Be students and teachers – learn, then teach the methodology of non-violence. “Every level of our society has to be transformed.”

- Become activists. Get involved in organizations. Pick one or two big issues and have a hand in them. “Canada is critical here.” Dear said. “I worry about Canada but there is a lot that you could do here in Ottawa.”

- Be visionaries of non-violence. “Think of the abolitionists,” Dear said. “They announced that a new world was coming and that slavery had to end. We are the new abolitionists. A new world is coming and it’s not going to be John McCain’s (the U.S. presidential candidate’s) 100 years of war.”

- Become prophets of non-violence. “Demand end to the 35 wars and the abolishment of all nuclear weapons, and institutionalize non violence in our societies.”

- Connect issues such as war, poverty and environmental degradation. “Ask this — where is the money that has been stolen for weapons but which belongs to the poor of the planet?”

Dear took questions following his remarks. One person describing himself as a former diplomat said that Canadians are told that they are good guys who are in Afghanistan to fight bad guys. “Don’t believe it,” he said. “We are fighting on behalf of the winners in a civil war against the losers. What our troops are being asked to do is wrong. We have to stand up against it. Don’t wear red on Fridays whatever you do.”

The man also said that Canada’s super secret commandos in the Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) have been sent to Afghanistan to kill people. “That’s what they do, they kill people.” He added that JTF2 is instructed in its deadly arts at Dwyer Hill Training Centre, just to the west of Ottawa.