A Montreal professor wrote the letter below, which we want to share as a great example of how to reach out to MPs about respecting the right to conscientious objection.
Thanks for sharing; our letters can inspire more and better 🙂
Dear Minister Freeland,
I am a part-time Teacher [in a university faculty], a dedicated citizen and community member who is deeply concerned about Canada’s investment in militarism and warfare. Myself, friends, family and colleagues are working and dedicated to life-giving practices and community building to support people who are disproportionately excluded from access to basic resources, including affordable housing, food, healthcare, and education.
Over 50 years ago Canada was considered a country that had robust social programs, now we are witnessing and working to navigate the effects of a housing crisis, higher food insecurity, and an overburdened healthcare system all of which have resounding and exponential impacts that deepen economic disparities among Canadians.
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Currently, where I live in Québec, “36% of residents do not have access to general practitioners” for basic healthcare needs and in emergency rooms “patients can wait more than 24 hours to be treated.” From 2022-2023 Canada-wide, “over 17,000 patients died while waiting for surgery or diagnostic scans.”
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During my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, I lived with 3 roommates, all Social Workers who are supporting youth, people experiencing homelessness, and domestic violence survivors, they themselves could not access mental health resources and struggled to find affordable housing. We witnessed overrun and underfunded shelters, and Toronto’s rental prices doubling since 2021 where the cost for a 1 bedroom was approximately ~$2495/month.
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“Based on the latest data from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Income Survey (CIS), 17.8% of households in the ten provinces were food-insecure in 2022. This amounted to 6.9 million Canadians, including almost 1.8 million children under the age of 18, living in households that experienced some level of food insecurity.”
We know that financial investment in the labour power of the people in education, healthcare, and housing is underfunded, and desperately needed. As such I was incredibly disappointed to see Canada’s new policy Our North, Strong and Free, which committed an additional $8.1 billion in military spending over the next five years and an additional $73 billion over the next two decades is a direct investment in disaster capitalism and profiting from warfare. It is disheartening to witness the government use tax money for militarism and weaponry both here and abroad, when we know that financial investment is needed in the aforementioned sectors.
For these reasons, I am a conscientious objector to engaging in war and militarism and to paying into these efforts. I join with other conscientious objectors in doing what I can to ensure that my taxes will not be used to produce, buy and sell military weapons or to engage in war and militarism. Concurrently, I will continue to educate young people, and work with communities to support and invest in community building, education, and improving access to food and housing.
While historically Canadian governments have respected the fundamental right to freedom of conscience more than other governments, currently our government is not a leader in this respect. In order to genuinely respect freedom of conscience, please consider the creation of a legal conduit for conscientious objectors to fulfill their community responsibility to pay taxes – without betraying their conscience commitment to people and peace-building.
I am hopeful that our collective and continued efforts will recognize and support the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provision for freedom of conscience and the redirection of the military portion of taxes to non-military peace-building efforts or investment in other sectors.
Sincerely,
___________________, Tiohtià :ke / Montréal, Québec