Peace Train on track again, this time to the United Nations in New York in March

 

In November, 40 people travelled on the Peace Train to Ottawa to ask the Canadian government to establish and fund a Centre of Excellence for Peace and Justice focused on research, education, and training in conflict resolution, diplomacy, and peace operations. 

On March 2, a dozen Peace Trainers will accompany Member of Parliament Elizabeth May on her trip by train from Montreal to the United Nations in New York to call on the Canadian government to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). 

“We going because Elizabeth challenged us to organize another peace train to show support for prohibiting nuclear weapons, and because we want to encourage the Canadian government to sign on to it,” says Keith Wyton, who along with his wife, Bernadette, organized the Ottawa Peace Train trip. 

The TPNW is an international agreement that bans nuclear weapons. It was adopted in 2017 and went into effect in 2021. The TPNW is the first legally binding agreement to prohibit the development, testing, production, use and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. 

Canada has not signed the TPNW, or even sent official observers to the meetings, indicating it is not practical for today's security concerns—something criticized by the Green Party, of which Mays is a member. 

For Keith, Canada’s refusal to sign the TPNW represents a failure of leadership and a failure to recognize that threat of nuclear war and the suffering it would cause. 

“Although the Canadian government claims to share the sentiment of the TPNW, it says the timing is off,” he says. “When I last checked, the time was 89 seconds to midnight according to the doomsday clock. In this race towards mutually assured destruction, we have simply run out of time.” 

In going to the United Nations, the Peace Train participants are asking the government of Canada to sign and ratify the TPNW and to play a pivotal role in helping the world to move away from the “mindset of war” that pervades so much thinking today. 

This would also enable them to represent a majority of Canadians who, in a 2021 Nanos poll, indicated they wanted the government to join the TPNW. 

In a reflection on the TPNW and the Peace Train trip to New York, Bernadette noted that seven former Canadian prime ministers, foreign ministers, and defence ministers signed an open letter in 2020 calling on the Canadian government to “show courage and boldness “ by joining the TPNW. 

“Elizabeth May has invited us to board another peace train with her from Montreal to New York and keep the peace movement growing,” she said. “We will join her and many other Canadians at the TPNW and do our best to represent Canadian enthusiasm for the TPNW, for the UN, and for all of our leaders working on nuclear disarmament.” 

The Third Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW runs from March 3–7, 2025 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.