Canada’s focus on defense should not preclude a strong peace agenda: Address to the Oct. 28 Parliamentary reception

By Keith and Bernadette Wyton

Address given to the Oct. 28 Parliamentary reception

Peace Train Canada (PTC) unites people across the country in renewed commitment to Canada’s first principles for enduring peace, justice, and common security as agreed to in the UN Charter.

Peace is the domain of physical, social, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is a fundamental condition for our survival and the only condition that allows relational harmony and non-violent coexistence for this and future generations.

The prosperity of peace can be cultivated in Canada by cultivating a robust centre for peace and justice. This is our one ask of government.

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.

Prevention of war is the first line of intelligent defense

Lest we forget the gross human and environmental violations of war, we must remember that prevention is the first line of intelligent defense. The solemn vow, “never again” is our moral commitment that the catastrophic horrors, mass slaughter, and state-sponsored genocide of world wars must never be allowed to happen again.

If we turn away from our promise, the “never again” may turn on us and become the end of peace instead of the end of war.

Rumi said, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. You deserve better.”

In this current period of fear, distrust, and fractured relationships we must turn our fear into constructive action. This is not a time to abandon our capacity for peace building, to cut our foreign aid and diplomatic services, to walk away from peacekeeping, and to sideline our common ethical framework forged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from which we recruit our strength and fearlessness.

The train stops here! The time is now. As proposed at last years Reception, we are urging Members of Parliament from every party to form a Peace and Disarmament Caucus to guide a policy framework in support of the peace imperative and a peace centre to embody that work.

Vision of the Peace Train to breathe new life into a culture of peace

The vision of PTC 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 and who acknowledge our profound interconnection and interdependence within the web of life.

Unfortunately, as we noted at our Parliamentary reception last year, challenges from within and without have left us standing at the crossroads of our Canadian identity. Now it seems we have moved into the crosshairs.

We were once encouraged to read the Prime Minister’s book extoling the strength of our values. Now we’re being asked to imprint on the value of our strength. But would we so readily dial down the needle on our moral compass, as though the motherload suddenly packed up and moved south?

Minister Joly announced that the government has made a choice for us to “change our culture toward defense.” In the race to build Canada’s Defense Industrial Complex, private companies are subsidized by us and urged to start up, scale up and get exporting.

Insatiable Military Industrial Complex threatens to turn coffers to coffins

This seems like a segue into the grip, from coffers to coffins, of the insatiable Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhour warned about, where the profits of a permanent weapons industry are enhanced by global tensions, competitive threat of lethality and manufactured war.

Once launched, there is no incentive or plan to ever scale back and no control over how weapons are accessed and used by third parties.

The U.S. is a sobering exemplar of the Orwellian mentality that takes hold in a compliant society dominated by a Big Brother Defense Industrial Complex.

While most were still reeling from the atrocities of the atomic bombings in Japan, Americans continued to tweak their technology in an ethical dessert until they had crafted a thermonuclear bomb 1,000 times more explosive than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

They then industrialized the process to keep those good jobs flowing at Los Alamos. By 1967 they were sitting on 31,255 nuclear bombs – each one capable of leaving millions dead and unleashing a civilization-ending war.

Even though this is menticide, where health right down to the helix of life is bartered for power and supremacy, the world still debates prohibiting these weapons of mass destruction and Canada still refuses to even observe the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Our country’s focus on defense should not preclude a strong peace agenda. In fact, the military should be serving the higher mandate held in the way we wage peace.

The brain behind any sound national security has two hemispheres: The military and peacebuilding

The brain behind any sound national security has two hemispheres: The left dedicated to military surveillance and protection and the right dedicated to universal peacebuilding, diplomatic relations, and conflict prevention. 

As in Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s analysis of the human brain, although the two sides have fundamentally different ways of paying attention to and experiencing reality, they must work together.

We are currently operating as though we’ve had a stroke, severely limiting the function of the right hemisphere—the one that holds the bigger picture, processing data within the context of our world as a living, interconnected, flowing whole.

Meanwhile, a more mechanized view dominates with surging military power and expenditures that have led to the severe crisis in peace and security that we see around the world today.

If we are going to wield power, let us wield the power of Pillay. We are greatly encouraged by the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Navi Pillay earlier this month for her lifelong dedication to the rule of law, international justice, and human rights accountability and for her exceptional courage and integrity that led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order. This is the kind of spine we need to stand our ground and shape peace in dark times.

Centre for Peace and Justice would serve as a hub of concrete action 

More than bricks and mortar, a Centre for Peace and Justice would serve as a hub of concrete action to back Canada’s eloquent words of peace such as those of the September 21st multilateral joint commitment to “work together in support of peace, stability, inclusive and sustainable development, shared prosperity, human dignity and rights for all.”

It would also provide checks and balances to avoid dynamics that are not in keeping with our peace commitments, such as the October 13th joint statement decrying Palestine for postponing elections this year, even as millions of voters are actively under military bombardment, displaced without fixed addresses, or trapped under the rubble of their own homes.

Regional stability and related safety around the world could have been better served by an expression of commitment to help secure an enduring ceasefire, end the violence, enable humanitarian relief, and eventually guarantee voter and scrutineer safety.

As Canada has committed 5% of it’s GDP to defense expenditures, PTC is asking it to commit at least .1% of that to establish a peace centre working in the service of its population and universal security. Who would object to one tenth of one percent for such a critical asset?

We all want peace in theory. This is a test. In this intensely challenging time, the contribution of every individual, especially every political leader, to tip the scale in favour of the prosperity and power of peace is critical. Please work with us to form a Peace and Disarmament Caucus to make it so.

May peace be upon and within every one of us.

Photo above: Bernadette Wyton speaks at the reception.