Golden Rule or Golden Dome: An address to Parliamentarians

By Bernadette Wyton

A presentation given to the Oct. 22 breakfast with Parliamentarians in Ottawa.

Since Peace Train Canada’s visit to Ottawa last year, the political climate has completely changed.

President Trump’s rise to power in an aura of dissonance and disrespect helped distill our minds and usher in our current Canadian government. The ongoing erosion of democratic values across the border is a warning call for us to re-examine our own.

We stand at the crossroads of our Canadian identity. Will we trade democratic values for militarized security? Will we uphold truth or submit to power? Will we cash in our inheritance of the Golden Rule for the glitter of a Golden Dome? Will we choose to live in the rubble of discontent, distrust, and disinformation or celebrate and uphold the institutions of truth and freedom that support our own individual freedom and agency?

As we teeter on the fulcrum of multiple tipping points, it becomes increasingly clear that peace is a fundamental condition for our survival. It is a process of constant adjustment toward enduring balance, stability, and security. It is the domain of physical, social, mental, and spiritual well-being.

This underlying prosperity can be cultivated by cultivating a robust centre for peace and common security—the goal of the petition to Parliament of Peace Train Canada.

Such a centre is necessary to hone the first line of intelligent defense—illuminating and addressing the underlying causes, perpetrators, and profiteers of conflict while diffusing reactionary hatred, propaganda, polarization, and violence.

This requires the free flow of information in an open society that upholds the United Nations Charter and the Rule of Law in restraining and civilizing excessive power.

A peace centre is necessary for shaping what is called Positive Peace: the attitudes, institutions, and structures that sustain peaceful societies.

As the Global Peace Index shows, peaceful societies are marked by wellbeing, happiness, higher GDP growth, lower interest rates, greater political stability, and more resilience to shocks.

The alternative is a world in arms that, as Eisenhower said, “is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.”

Even so, Canada is being lured onto a competitive, slippery slope of military expenditures, crowding out investment in many areas of the Peaceful Industrial Complex that underpin our social cohesion.

We are casting a negative spin on Positive Peace, contributing to its steady global decline, which will continue unabated without adequate investment.

The vision of Peace Train Canada is to breathe new life into our identity as a culture of peace.

It emerges from the collective spirit of individuals who seek truth and justice; who have learned to lighten up, open up, and listen up; and who acknowledge our profound interconnection and interdependence within the web of life.

Such a culture is made of and by “we the peoples,” otherwise known as civil society. We are the global majority.

We know that peace is not pretty. It’s messy work shaped from the raw materials of disagreement, discord, and disaster. As we always say, “Peace grows out of the compost of our mistakes; humbly allowing that we all make them, courageously agreeing that we all can learn from them.”

When leaders exploit fear, chiming out, “if you want peace, prepare for war” we say, “No, there would already be abundant peace if that were the case. If you really want peace, prepare and train for peace on a daily basis and transmit that power to citizens and every organ of society. That is what a peace centre is for.”

When NATO calls on us to “don the mindset of war” we think of our grandchildren and set our mind in a different frame, knowing that our capacity for diplomacy and innovative approaches to conflict resolution is untapped; knowing that a mindset of war would bequeath yet another burden and, to quote our Prime Minister, “The burdens . . . that we are pushing on to the next generation are unfair, inequitable, and irresponsible.”

When our government refuses to even observe the proceedings of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and tries to convince us that abolition is not practical right now, we say, “If not now when? If not us who? What is practical about bartering our health, right down to the helix of life, for security based on the constant provocation of mutually assured Armageddon?

“Deterrence works until it doesn’t and we have never been closer to the doesn’t.”

To choose life, we must choose peace. It is an intelligent perspective gained by constant surveillance, not to search and destroy difference, but to seek and discover a middle way forward—a shared path on the common ground we all stand on. That is our strength.

Let us recruit our strength. Let us stand our ground. It is time for Canada to set down a marker by establishing a Peace Centre.

Photo above: Keith and Bernadette Wyton with Manitoba senator Marilou McPhedran at the Oct. 22 Parliamentary breakfast.