Defining Canada's 'National' Interest
Recently I read the 2004 book Who Killed the Canadian Military? by J.L. Granatstein, a Canadian historian who has served as director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum and chair of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st century, which Granatstein calls a “pro-defence lobby group”. My father, who was a lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, owned a copy of Granatstein’s book and I read it as part of my effort to finish all the unread titles in my collection.
In his book, Granatstein outlines what he views as decades of chronic underfunding of the Canadian military by the federal government. As a consummate bourgeois historian, the author calls for increased military spending in accord with what he calls Canada’s “national interest”. What Granatstein calls the “national interest” is in fact the interests of Canadian capitalists who are the ruling class in this country, and who require a strong military to defend those interests abroad. “Canadians do not appear to comprehend that a military exists to fight wars and, ultimately, to protect the national interests,” Granatstein says.
While Granatstein is vague for much of the book about what Canada’s “national” interest consists of, his final chapter specifically defines what he thinks those national interests are, which are worth examining. In his own words, Granatstein believes Canada’s national interests are as follows:
“Canada must safeguard its territory and the security of its people, and work to maintain its national unity.”
“Canada must act to maintain and enhance its independence.”
“Canada must promote the nation’s economic growth to enhance its prosperity.”
“Canada must work with its friends for democracy and freedom.”
Let’s look at each of these in turn, and whose interests they really represent.
“Canada must safeguard its territory and the security of its people, and work to maintain its national unity.”
To understand the implications of this statement we first need to define our terms, starting with the Canadian state itself. As Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, the state in the last analysis consists of armed bodies of men who defend existing property relations. It is a product of the division of society into classes, and an instrument for the oppression of one class by another.
The dominant state form today is the nation-state. What is a nation? The classical Marxist definition can be found in “Marxism and the National Question”, which is credited to Joseph Stalin, but was largely ghostwritten by Lenin (it’s no accident that Stalin, after he became leader of the U.S.S.R. as representative of the parasitic Soviet bureaucracy, ignored the Leninist position on the national question and engaged in large-scale oppression of national minorities, including the deportation of whole peoples). The essay defines a nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”
Like many nation-states, Canada includes another, historically oppressed nation within it: Quebec. Where the Leninist position on the national question supports the rights of all nations to self-determination—while always centring the class question—for Canada’s capitalist class, maintenance of “national unity” includes keeping Quebec a part of Canada, by force if necessary.
Granatstein describes without comment Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act during the 1970 October Crisis, suspending civil liberties and deploying the Canadian army to Quebec in a massive crackdown. “In the eyes of many Quebecers, the October crisis revealed the real nature of the state,” Benoît Tanguay writes, noting that repression was “not directed strictly against the FLQ, but against the entire national liberation movement and the left”. The bourgeoisie and their apologists, such as Granatstein, call the violent repression of any movement that threatens the capitalist state the maintenance of “order”.
While the need of the Canadian state to “safeguard its territory and the security of its people” includes fending off foreign threats, Granatstein’s reference to “security” means the security of the capitalist class to maintain their private property through their ownership of the means of production. That’s why Canada joined NATO during the Cold War and why its ruling class viewed the Soviet Union as an existential threat to their interests, which Granatstein identifies as the “national” interest.
When one looks at the wars Canada has participated in since its foundation as a state in 1867, none has involved a direct threat to Canadian territory. The Canadian military has fought wars in South Africa, in Europe and the Pacific, in Korea, and in Afghanistan because Canadian capitalists believed to do so was in their own class interests. As Granatstein acknowledges, these interests include supporting the dominant imperialist power of the day and Canada’s biggest trading partner—first the U.K., later the U.S.A. On that note…
“Canada must act to maintain and enhance its independence.”
This one is ironic, given how closely Granatstein ties Canada’s “national” (read: ruling-class) interests to U.S. imperialism. To be clear, he is absolutely correct that the well-being of Canadian capitalism depends on remaining in the good graces of the United States government.
The United States is not going to disappear. Canada is joined to the United States and will remain so. Geography has made us neighbours, and by and large we are extremely lucky in having the Americans next door. We might have been Poland, sandwiched between the Germans and the Russians. Unlike us, the Americans take their national defence seriously, and never more so than after September 11, 2001. They have long had concern for their northern frontier, and since Franklin Roosevelt’s day they have worried that Canada wasn’t doing enough to keep its territory protected… Canada has to act so that no threat to the United States will ever be facilitated by Canadian weakness. We must also ensure that the Americans do not believe we are getting a free ride on their heavily laden backs. Neutrality is not an option because the Americans cannot permit it. Since the United States will always be there, each generation, each Canadian government, needs to come to grips with this reality.
For Granatstein, who fancies himself a realist, independence for a small power such as Canada means having a significant enough military presence to guarantee Ottawa a seat at the table. Without a strong military, he believes, “someone in Washington will decide on policy without consulting Ottawa… Participation gets you the right to a share in decisions, and that, in an interdependent world, is the only realistic definition of sovereignty for a small power.” Independence for Canada, in his view, paradoxically requires subservience to the United States.
“Canada must promote the nation’s economic growth to enhance its prosperity.”
Prosperity for who? Working-class Canadians today can barely afford rent or groceries, while Justin Trudeau’s government plans to spend $120 billion on submarines—reflecting U.S. pressure for NATO members to devote at least two per cent of GDP on military spending.
Of course Canada’s economy relies on trade with the U.S.A. As Granatstein writes:
Canada has to promote its economic growth. More than 40 per cent of our gross domestic product and some 30 percent of our jobs come from trade with the United States, and almost 85 percent of our exports go to or pass through the United States. Thus, our leaders have to be very aware of the importance of keeping the southbound trade channels open. We have seen the hurt inflicted on the beef industry by a single case of mad cow disease or on our wood products by disputes over softwood lumber. In fact, the vast majority of Canadian products enter the United States without difficulty, and our prosperity and our jobs depend on this trade. The United States is a superpower, and Canada is not. Very simply, our leaders must cut their cloth to fit this situation. We cannot offend the United States too often or too grievously or we will pay a serious price. Canada can be brought to its knees not by a US invasion or a dramatic closing of the border but by a few moments of extra inspection time by US Customs and Immigration officers at the border. The passengers at Pearson, Trudeau, and Vancouver international airports and the trucks at Fort Erie and Windsor will be backed up for kilometres. Given the security fears in the United States, given Canada’s sometimes lax efforts at tracking down terrorists, the Americans will believe themselves justified in acting toughly. Keeping the Yanks happy, or at least not angry, must be a national interest.
Putting aside its overwhelming, post-9/11 focus on the threat of terrorism, this analysis remains valid today. Yet recent history suggests the efforts of U.S. allies to illustrate loyalty through participation in U.S. imperialist wars has meant nothing. President-elect Donald Trump called for a minimum tariff of 10 per cent on all imports into the United States, which estimates suggest could decrease Canada’s GDP from between 0.4 to five per cent. More recently, he has threatened tariffs of 25 per cent on all imports from Canada and Mexico.
Trump has undermined Granatstein’s central argument: that Canadian military support for U.S. imperialist wars helps guarantee Canada’s prosperity. Canada spent 20 years at war in Afghanistan, which ended in humiliating defeat and the return of the Taliban to power. Two decades of Canadian support to U.S. imperialism in its war for influence in Central Asia, it turns out, meant nothing in terms of “enhancing Canadian prosperity”, in Granatstein’s terms. Before anyone acts as if Trump is solely responsible for this shift, the U.S.—like all countries—had already been shifting to protectionism and economic nationalism amid the global economic downturn.
The lesson is clear: steadfast support for U.S. imperialism does not guarantee Canadian prosperity. Cycles of boom and bust are intrinsic to capitalism. In periods of recession, nation-states always act in the interests of the ruling capitalist class, which means protectionist measures that only worsen the economic crisis. A socialist economy, in which the working class controls the means of production, would allow for the rational democratic planning of the economy. But this is something the bourgeoisie can never allow.
“Canada must work with its friends for democracy and freedom.”
Do we even need to point out the hypocrisy in this one? “Democracy” and “freedom” are euphemisms for capitalist rule in countries allied to the United States, which has overthrown countless democratically elected governments whose policies threatened the interests of the U.S. ruling class. Canada has consistently helped U.S. imperialism in these efforts.
In 1961, for example, Canada supported CIA-backed efforts to overthrow and assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2004, Canadian special forces commandos “secured” the airport through which U.S. Marines kidnapped Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, bundling him onto a plane and depositing him in the Central African Republic. An estimated 500 Canadian troops patrolled the streets of Port-au-Prince to “restore order” after Aristide’s overthrow.
In Venezuela, Canada helped organize a failed coup to overthrow the democratically elected government. Following Venezuela’s 2020 parliamentary election, Canada’s foreign ministry announced that it would not accept the results, despite the fact that international observers favourably compared Venezuelan elections to those in the United States. Canada backed the farcical attempt of imperialist quisling Juan Guaidó to declare himself the unelected “president “ of Venezuela.
Conclusion
The interests of Canada’s capitalist ruling class are diametrically opposed to those of workers. Twenty years after publishing his book demanding more military spending, Granatstein is still at work. In a recent article for the right-wing Macdonald-Laurier Institute, he demands more money for the military:
Russia is on the march, its brutal invasion of Ukraine continuing since February 2022. China under President Xi Jinping is arming itself rapidly, threatening Taiwan, and building bases across the South China Sea it claims as its own waters. North Korea is sending troops to aid Russia’s war against Ukraine and building ever more powerful missiles while its population starves. Iran is sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East and abroad, aiding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in their attacks. Our enemies are on the move, and the situation is not promising. It seems that we are in a prewar era, and that is why the Western democracies are rearming.
Quite revealing how Granatstein ignores Canada funding and training neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as well as its support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, while stoking fear against Russia, China, and Iran—all official U.S. “enemies”. Support for “Canadian sovereignty” is indistinguishable from support for U.S. imperialism.