At the end of last year, the Business Council of Canada (BCC), formerly the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, released a report calling on the government to increase military spending to 3 percent of GDP. Currently Canada devotes 1.37 percent of GDP to defense spending, but the BBC, which represents 170 of the country’s top CEOs, proposes raising this to 2.5 percent over the next decade, with further increases beyond that. The BCC’s plan would add over $40 billion a year (in today’s dollars) to military spending. To fund this massive increase — over twenty times the size of Environment Canada’s budget — the lobby group is calling for cuts to other government departments.
The BCC, whose members include grocery store head Galen Weston Jr, Power Corporation’s Paul Desmarais Jr, and top bank executives, has a long history of promoting militarism. It has organized tributes to the Canadian Armed Forces, supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and endorsed Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense initiative. In a 1981 report titled “Canada’s Defence Policy: Capability Versus Commitments,” the group bemoaned the “benign neglect and inadequacy of resources for nearly 20 years” that made the Canadian Forces “incapable of meeting the international military commitments which Canada has assumed.”
But far from the lofty rhetoric of its reports, the BCC’s support for increased military spending is closely tied to its representation of arms producers and related industries that benefit from greater war spending. Members include leaders of military suppliers CAE, MDA Space, and Bombardier.
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Auteur: Yves Engler
