Review by Koozma J. Tarasoff, 23 July 2012

Ian McKay and Jamie Swift. Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. Toronto, Ontario: Between The Lines, 2012. 362 pp. i-xiii. ISBN: 978-1-926662-77-0. Includes bibliographical references and index. $24.95. Also issued in electronic format.

 

On June 14, 2012, I attended the second of 3 book launch presentations in Ottawa. 50 people came to hear two scholars discuss Canada’s future, sponsored by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Council of Canadians, Workers History Museum, Citizens for Public Justice, and Octopus Books.

Their topic was Canada’s democracy and how the current Conservative Government has been attempting to rebrand the country from a peaceful one to a militaristic one.

Ian McKay is an award-winning history professor at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. His co-author is an acclaimed journalist Jamie Swift also from Kingston; this is his 8th book.

 

The authors reveal that the current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative cabinet members are attacking traditional Canadian values of multiculturalism, democracy, the rule of law, a strong social safety net, and global peacekeeping. Their ‘new Warriors’ act as if they were enforcers in Canada’s professional hockey leagues. They do not hesitate to misuse history to achieve their ends.

 

Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper and historian David Bercuson regularly publish co-ed pieces in the mainstream media. They use such words as ‘must’, ‘need’ and ‘necessary’ in abolishing the welfare state, social programs and peace-keeping. They look forward to a society in which ‘individuals contend for prizes, honours, and recognition of their superiority.’

 

Another new warrior is J. L. Granatstein who has rallied against peacekeeping because it ‘sapped the potency of Canada’s soldiery’ (p.230). Granatstein is senior research fellow with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (partly funded by the Department of National Defence).

 

All of these warriors assume that war itself will always be with us, so we must be ready for a perpetual war. For them the cause of war is just and the sacrifice is noble. It’s a case of the ‘good guys’ against the ‘bad guys’ in a kind of endless war between civilization and barbarism. These are the values that Prime Minister Stephen Harper supports.

 

McKay and Swift summarize the ultra-Conservative approach as follows:

 

‘This sort of sturdy individualism appears to be particularly attractive to men of a certain age who have no actual experience of arms conflict, and it is matched by their enthusiasm for war. If the vision smacks of the war of each against all, that is because it is exactly that. At home and abroad, Canadians are urged to think like the uber-patriotic hockey commentator Don Cherry and his approach that glorifies fighting as integral to the national game. It was against this background that in 2011 Canadians were treated to the spectacle of newly minted foreign minister John Baird scrawling a message on a bomb and heading off to Libya where Canadian forces were part of a NATO effort to assist in bombing the country to freedom’ (p.13).

 

Taking examples from the 1812 Canada-US War, the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, Canada’s UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, and Canada’s military effort in Afghanistan, McKay and Swift show how the extreme makeover of Canada is a threat to Canada’s democracy. Here are some of the indicators of the new makeover:

 

• Parliamentary democracy and public debate is curtailed by such tactics as passing the omnibus budget Bill C-38 (a kind of Trojan Horse) with 71 items without adequate debate on such important measures as the curtailment of federal environmental assessment; changing the Fisheries Act to allow the unbridled access of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline; raising the eligibility for the Old Age Security to 67 years from 65; restricting Employment Insurance benefits; repealing the Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act; eliminating the office of the Inspector General of Canada’s spy agency; allowing US federal agents in cross-border operations to arrest Canadians on Canadian soil; Parks Canada has taken a staff and financial hit by the government permanently removing monitoring and ecological restoration from its responsibilities; increase sanctions on charities that devote more than 10 percent of their resources to political advocacy, and much more.

• Conservative policies have offered a utopian motto of the so-called ‘perfect market system.’ For them, money takes precedence over democracy. In the past 30 years,  the salaries of CEOs have risen up to 250 times more than the regular professional worker. The result is that Canada’s inequality rate is reaching that of the terrible US rates where rich and gigantic corporations ruthlessly control the entire country. Conservatives have failed to look at Iceland and Germany, for example, were taxes are high, but where its citizens have great free medical and educational services and feel that democracy and fair equality are more important than that of the market forces.

• For ultra-Conservatives, fear is central to maintaining a permanent political polarization. It is always ‘us-versus-them’ formulation. The former US President George W. Bush used this tactic during his disastrous term. The Warrior Nation encourages the far right wing cult of fear because one needs an enemy to wage an endless war. Bush and his type such as Dick Cheney have forgotten their history. It was a US decorated general, Major General Smedley Butler, who in 1935 wrote a book declaring that war is a racket and should be shut down. Later US President Dwight D. Eisenhower on his last speech in 1961 warned the Americans of the dangers of the military industrial complex. To their shame, today the US has hundreds of military bases around the world.

• The Warrior Nation proposes a full militarization of society by promoting the culture of war over the culture of peace by such techniques as: exploiting the symbols of the Queen, the Governor General, the use of fighter plane fly pasts, the 21-gun-salute, the use of the military instead of the RCMP, the revival of heroic myths, such as Vimy Ridge, the War of 1812 and other battles, to invigorate the notion of Canada as a warrior nation; promoting war at professional hockey and football events by celebrating the military, echoing the drums and bugle patriotism marshaling support for World War I; using the yellow-ribbon campaign designed to reinvigorate the country in a way that elevates the military as an institution (the symbol came from the US Cavalry fighting the Cheyennes and Araphos, which later in 1973 was consolidated as a symbol of US troops ‘fighting imperial wars in 1973’ (p.254). ); and launching Project Hero, sponsored in 2010 by Rick Hillier (former Stephen Harper’s chief of defence staff), which sought to silence criticism of war by equating it with the failure to support our troops (in response, 16 professors at the University of Regina signed a public letter to the university suggesting it withdraw from Project of Heroes (p.256).).

• When rebranding Canada as a Warrior Nation, known as Operation Connection, was launched in February 6, 2006, a massive military onslaught took place. According to Ian McKay and Jamie Swift (p.279) ‘no hockey game was too minor, no charity dinner too obscure, no country-fair too remote for this marketing exercise .…Veterans became regular visitors to classrooms, their way prepared by textbooks that present Canadian history as a succession of military achievements.’

• Greatly enhanced executive power of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet ministers, giving them extraordinary powers in foreign policy. This has implications for civic liberties.  The meaning of militarization has proceeded into new spheres: ‘dissidents’ now tend to be ‘terrorists’ and the ‘Canadian border’ is now ‘North American security perimeter’ (p.280). In general, military solutions are being substituted for diplomacy, effective intelligence and democratic institutions.

In reading Warrior Nation, I was disturbed at how far the Harper regime has attempted to rebrand Canada as a warrior nation. This is not the vision that my grandparents, the Spirit Wrestlers (Doukhobors) came to Canada with. They were pacifists, imbued with the Tolstoyan nonkilling philosophy. For them it is wrong to kill another human being. Fortunately, the  nonkilling philosophy is today being advanced internationally by the Center for Global Nonkilling in Hawaii. In Canada, the Canadian Department of Peace Initiative and its Bill C-373 in the House of Commons is promoting this new thinking that peace can be best achieved through peaceful means and not by military interventions.

 

To get Bill C-373 passed in the House, we need concerned Canadians to raise up and be counted. Let’s stop Harper from militarily rebranding our country! We have a critical choice to make — to ensure that ‘warrior Canada’ does not  become reality; that the military industrial complex gets it proper boot; and that we can regain our status as friendly keepers of our brothers and sisters in our world community. The alternative is a fortress compound where might is right, where democracy is a figment of our imagination, and where war readiness is a slavery of our times.

As citizens, we indeed have a choice. Let’s change the debate and choose the path that will benefit all of us — not just the 1% of the upper class. Begin now by reading Ian McKay and Jamie Swift’s excellent book Warrior Nation. Then go to the Internet and sign a petition to establish a new institution within Parliament that would open the door to infinitely new opportunities for creating the culture of peace in Canada and beyond. The task is URGENT for our future, for our children and for our children’s children!

After the meeting, I personally congratulated the authors for a well-researched treatise on the state of our country and its future. Dr. Ian McKay expressed delight in exchanging his book for mine on Spirit Wrestlers: Doukhobor Pioneers’ Strategies for Living. ‘I got the best deal’, he told me, as we both autographed our respective books.