It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
X-energy, TransAlta to assess use of Xe-100 in Alberta
03 April 2024
X-Energy Reactor Company and Canadian power producer TransAlta Corporation are to study the feasibility of deploying an X-energy Xe-100 advanced small modular nuclear reactor at a repurposed fossil fuel power plant in the province of Alberta.
The Xe-100 reactor design (Image: X-energy)
The partners will evaluate the economics, regulatory impacts, licensing requirements, timelines, and overall suitability of deploying an Xe-100 plant at a fossil fuel power plant site. The study will also focus on identifying and building Alberta-based supply chain partners and vendors and economic benefits for the province.
X-energy and TransAlta will be supported by Canada-based nuclear and professional engineering firms, including Hatch Ltd, Kinectrics Inc, and PCL Nuclear Management Inc. The study results are expected to provide "valuable insights and data to inform future TransAlta project and business decisions".
The study will be supported through funding from Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA), an initiative supported by the Government of Alberta designed to invest in promising technologies and solutions to reduce emissions throughout the province. X-energy has been awarded CASD623,152 (USD459,079) in funding for the project through ERA's Reshaping Energy Systems funding competition. It is one of 13 projects to receive funding totalling CAD33.7 million through the competition. "These projects, valued at approximately CAD88 million in public and private investment, focus on technologies that will reduce emissions and contribute to a more flexible and sustainable energy grid in Alberta," ERA said.
Alberta - which last year established a goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 - joined the provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan as a signatory to a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on small modular reactor (SMR) development in 2021 and has more recently signed memorandums of understanding with several SMR developers including ARC Clean Technology, X-energy and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute.
The Government of Alberta is reconsidering the possibility of having conventional nuclear power plants, Affordability and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf told reporters at the provincial legislature on 28 March. His comment was the first public suggestion that the government is contemplating conventional nuclear power plants like those in Ontario and New Brunswick, according to CBC.
"This partnership with Emissions Reduction Alberta marks a significant step forward for clean energy technologies in the province," said Benjamin Reinke, X-energy's vice president for global business development. "We are pleased to work with TransAlta, a leader in power production, innovation, and sustainability, to evaluate how X-energy can support the province's climate goals.
"Alberta's tradition of energy innovation combined with our advanced nuclear technology offers a powerful solution to reducing emissions while increasing reliable baseload generation capacity and supporting the region's key economic drivers."
Blain van Melle, Executive Vice President, Commercial and Customer Relations at TransAlta, added: "TransAlta is excited to work with Emissions Reduction Alberta and our project partners to explore how X-energy's innovative small modular reactor technology can potentially augment TransAlta's existing sites and assets to deliver clean, reliable heat and power to our customers at competitive rates and without emissions from fossil fuels."
The Xe-100 - a high-temperature gas reactor capable of a thermal output of 200 MW or (80 MW electrical) which uses fuel made from robust TRISO fuel particles - is one of two designs selected by the US Department of Energy in 2020 to receive USD80 million each of initial cost-shared funding to build an advanced reactor demonstration plant that can be operational within seven years. X-energy announced in March 2023 that the first deployment of the design will be at one of materials science company Dow's sites on the US Gulf Coast. Seadrift - where Dow manufactures more than 4,000,000 pounds (1816 tonnes) of materials per year for use in applications such as food packaging, footwear, wire and cable insulation, solar cell membranes and packaging for pharmaceutical products - was selected to host the first Xe-100 in May 2023.
X-energy has also signed a joint development agreement with utility Energy Northwest for the deployment of up to 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors in central Washington State.
X-energy aims to deploy the first advanced small modular reactor in Alberta by the early 2030s.
In January this year, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission concluded that there are no fundamental barriers to licensing the Xe-100, an outcome that X-energy said increases confidence in proceeding with formal licence applications in Canada.
Plants along the lower Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor’s appointment.
Oh, wait, maybe I’m a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn’t on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn’t in life as I’d previously known it. Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller,Jr.’s sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, last visited in 1961 at age 17. It’s about a world ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later, still barely in recovery mode.
I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like they existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambience had a distinctly end-of-the-world (at least as I’d known it) feel to it.
Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was neither Mars, nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New York, engulfed in smoke you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds of it blown south from Canada where more than 400 wildfires were then burning in an utterly out of control, historically unprecedented fashion across much of that country — as, in fact, all too many of them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city’s streets and enveloped its most famous buildings, bridges, and statues in a horrifying mist.
That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my life, reportedly hadthe worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet — Philadelphia would take our place the very next day — including an air quality index that hit a previously unimaginable 484. That day, my city was headline-making in a way not seen since September 11, 2001. In fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least terrorizing) attack of the first order.
Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we — New Yorkers included — now live on a new, significantly more dangerous planet, and that June 7th may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a horror show for the ages. Unfortunately, you can count on one thing: it’s barely the beginning. On an overheating planet where humanity has yet to bring its release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas under any sort of reasonable control, where summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the past in a fast-heating Arctic, where sea levels are rising ominously and fires, storms, and droughts are growing more severe by the year, there’s so much worse to come.
In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn’t even made it to summer when the heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control from Alberta in the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would have been unimaginable. I doubt even Walter M. Miller, Jr., could have dreamed up such a future, no less that, as of a week ago, 1,400% of the normal acreage of that country, or more than 8.7 million acres, had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still to come); nor that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough firefighters, despite recent all-too-flammable summers — having, in fact, to import them from around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort of control — would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: that’s only the beginning. After all, United Nations climate experts are now suggesting that, by the end of this century, if climate change isn’t brought under control, the intensity of global wildfires could rise by another 57%. So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange is undoubtedly the color of our future and we haven’t seen anything like the last of such smoke bombs.
Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC nightly news, which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke disaster in New York in a big-time way — and, hey, in their reporting, no one even bothered to mention climate change. The words went unused. My best guess: maybe they were all on Mars.
Been There, Done That
In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7th smoke-out as the 2023 climate-change equivalent of September 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe that’s a far too ominous comparison and I’ll tell you why.
On September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000 people died. That was indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist attack in history. And the U.S. responded by launching a set of invasions, occupations, and conflicts that came to be known as “the global war on terror.” In every sense, however, it actually turned out to be a global war of terror, a 20-plus-year disaster of losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project is: almost a million direct deaths and possibly 3.7 millionindirect ones.
Take that in for a moment. And think about this: in the United States, there hasn’t been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask yourself: Was the president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, while he and his top officials lied through their teeth to the American people, penalized in any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow out in Texas who’s become known for his portrait painting in his old age and who, relatively recently, confused his decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin’s to invade Ukraine.
Or, for that matter, has the U.S. military suffered any penalties for its record in response to 9/11? Just consider this for starters: the last time that military actually won a war was in 1991. I’m thinking of the first Gulf War and that “win” would prove nothing but a prelude to the Iraq disaster to come in this century. Explain this to me then: Why does the military that’s proven incapable of winning a war since that 9/11 terror attack still get more money from Congress than the next — your choice — 9 or 10 militaries on this planet combined, and why, no matter who’s in charge in Washington, including cost-cutting Republicans, does the Pentagon never — no, absolutely never — see a cut in its funding, only yet more taxpayer dollars? (And mind you, this is true on a planet where the real battles of the future are likely to involve fire and smoke.)
There may indeed be a “debt ceiling” in this country, but there seems to be no ceiling at all when it comes to funding that military. In fact, Republican hawks in the Senate only recently demanded yet more money for the Pentagon in the debt-ceiling debate (despite the fact that, amid other cuts, its funding was already guaranteed to rise by 3% or $388 billion). As Senator Lindsey Graham so classically put it about that (to him) pitiful rise, “This budget is a win for China.”
Now, I don’t mean to say that there’s been no pain anywhere. Quite the opposite. American troops sent to Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other countries came home suffering everything from literal wounds to severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. (In these years, in fact, the suicide rate among veterans has been unnervingly high.)
And did the American people pay? You bet. Through the teeth, in fact, in a moment when inequality in this country was already going through the roof — or, if you’re not one of the ever-greater numbers of billionaires, perhaps the floor would be the more appropriate image. And has the Pentagon paid a cent? No, not for a thing it’s done (and, in too many cases, is still doing).
Consider this the definition of decline in a country that, as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis continue to make desperately clear, could be heading for a place too strange and disturbing for words, a place both as old as the present president of the United States (should he win again) and as new as anyone can imagine.
Will the Climate Version of 9/11 Become Daily Life?
Throughout history, it’s true that great imperial powers have risen and fallen, but lest you think this is just another typical imperial moment when, as the U.S. declines, China will rise, take a breath — oops, sorry, watch out for that smoke! — and think again. As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re no longer on the planet we humans have inhabited these last many thousand years. We’re now living in a new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world. It’s not just this country that’s in decline but Planet Earth itself as a livable place for humanity and for so many other species. Climate change, in other words, is quickly becoming the climate emergency.
And as the reaction to 9/11 shows, faced with a moment of true terror, don’t count on the response of either the United States or the rest of humanity being on target. After all, as that smoke bomb in New York suggests, these days, too many of those of us who matter — whether we’re talking about the climate-change-denying Trumpublican Party or the leaders of the Pentagon — are fighting the wrong wars, while the major companies responsible for so much of the terror to come, the giant fossil-fuel outfits, continue to pull in blockbuster — no, record! — profits for destroying our future. And that simply couldn’t be more dystopian or, potentially, a more dangerously smoky concoction. Consider that a form of terrorism even al-Qaeda couldn’t have imagined. Consider all of that, in fact, a preview of a world in which a horrific version of 9/11 could become daily life.
So, if there is a war to be fought, the Pentagon won’t be able to fight it. After all, it’s not prepared for increasing numbers of smoke bombs, scorching megadroughts, ever more powerful and horrific storms, melting ice, rising sea levels, broiling temperatures, and so much more. And yet, whether you’re American or Chinese, that’s likely to sum up our true enemy in the decades to come. And worse yet, if the Pentagon and its Chinese equivalent find themselves in a war, Ukraine-style or otherwise, over the island of Taiwan, you might as well kiss it all goodbye.
It should be obvious that the two greatest greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, will rise or fall (as will the rest of us) on the basis of how well (or desperately poorly) they cooperate in the future when it comes to the overheating of this planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that matter the world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what’s clearly going to be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to dystopian vistas that could stretch into the distant future?
Will humanity react to the climate emergency as ineptly as this country did to 9/11? Is there any hope that we’ll act effectively before we find ourselves on a version of Mars or, as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and others like them clearly wish, fossil-fuelize ourselves to hell and back? In other words, are we truly fated to live on a smoke bomb of a planet?
Canada’s “Jekyll-and-Hyde” Masquerade as Nation that Supposedly Supports Pacifism and Progressive Principles
How Canada’s military-industrial complex sucks up to and serves the American one
by Jeremy Kuzmarov / August 1st, 2022
[Source: Justin Trudeau photo – people.com; Dr. Jekyll & Hyde poster – amazon.com; collage courtesy of Steve Brown]
LONG READ
On July 8, the Canadian government led by Justin Trudeau announced that it would send 38 General Dynamics-made armored vehicles to Ukraine as part of $500 million in military aid allotted to Ukraine that had been attached to Canada’s budget in April.
That budget saw a $6 billion increase in military spending from the $26.4 billion total in 2021, which was to be used to boost cyber security and strengthen the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian defense organization.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that our own peaceful democracy—like all the democracies of the world—depends ultimately on the defense of hard power….The world’s dictators should never mistake our civility for pacifism. We know that freedom does not come for free, and that peace is guaranteed only by our readiness to fight for it.”
These comments display the priorities of Canada’s current leadership, which is committed to boosting defense spending by $18 billion over the next five years—when it was already ranked 12th in military spending—and to alliance with the United States against Russia and almost all of its other enemies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gestures while inspecting NATO troops at Adazi military base in Kadaga, Latvia, in 2018. [Source: cbc.ca]
Trudeau has also signed a $15-billion agreement to export light armored vehicles (LAVs) produced by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ontario, to Saudi Arabia, which sustains the U.S. Empire by trading its oil in U.S. dollars.
A Montreal-based journalist, Engler has written 11 books that are mostly critical of Canadian foreign policy. In this one, he shows that the Canadian military has a long and bloody record going back to its subjugation of Canada’s native population and support for British imperial interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.
After World War II, the Canadian military became more tightly integrated with that of the United States, supplying troops for imperial interventions like in the Korean War, while developing its own military-industrial complex that served as an adjunct of the U.S.
The Canadian Army originated from the British army which conquered North America from the Indians and French with tremendous brutality. Halifax became Britain’s primary naval base in North America after the violent displacement of Mi’kmaq First Nation people who had their heads placed on stakes when they tried to resist.
The father of the Canadian army, William D. Otter, was known for his merciless suppression of Cree and Assiniboine warriors in Saskatchewan.
Otter went on to command Canadian forces in South Africa in the Boer war, which became intimately involved in some of the nastier aspects including search, expel and burn missions.
Canadian infantrymen fighting the Boers in South Africa in 1902. [Source: warmuseum.ca]
William Heneker, a native of Sherbrooke, Quebec, and a Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada trained officer who led expeditions to conquer West Africa for the British, published an influential British training manual which noted how “the great thing is to impress savages with the fact that they are the weaker, and…enforce the will of the white man.”
Nationalist mythology presents Canada as a uniquely pacifist and benevolent country; however, in World War I, which Canada joined out of its loyalty to the British Empire, Canadian troops developed a terrible reputation for violence against prisoners.
After Canadian troops invaded Russia in 1918 with five other countries including the U.S. in an attempt to quell the Bolshevik Revolution, they were rebuked by locals for the “calm skills with which they used shrapnel as a short-range weapon against [Bolshevik] foot soldiers.”
Canada’s Siberian expeditionary force in Vladivostok in winter 1919. [Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca]
When Canadian troops were found guilty of murdering or raping Korean civilians during the Korean War, they were usually released from prison within a year or two at most.
Fifty years later in Afghanistan—where Canadian troops fired an astounding 4.7 million bullets and deployed white phosphorus—Captain Ray Wiss praised Canadian troops as “the best at killing people…we are killing a lot more of them [Afghans] than they are of us, and we have been extraordinarily successful recently…we have managed to kill between 10 and 20 Taliban each day.”
In 1910, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was established with the aim of reinforcing the British Empire. It was repeatedly deployed in the British Caribbean and in 1932 lent support to a military-coup government in El Salvador that brutally suppressed peasant and Indigenous rebellions.
First recruiting poster for Royal Canadian Navy. [Source: rcinet.ca]
Thirty years later, in 1962, the Canadian Navy participated in the U.S. blockade of Cuba, while assuming responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines. When 23,000 U.S. troops invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, a Canadian warship was sent to Santo Domingo, in the words of Defense Minister Paul Hellyer, “to stand by in case it is required.”
Subsequently, the RCN planned and exercised an invasion of Jamaica that was designed to secure the Alcan bauxite facilities from rioters.
In the 1990s, the RCN sent warships to the Middle East to enforce brutal sanctions on Iraq.
RCN vessels also enforced a naval blockade of Libya and kept the Port of Misrata open during the 2011 Operation Odyssey Dawn, a U.S.-NATO operation that resulted in the overthrow and lynching of Libya’s nationalist leader, Muammar Qaddafi.
During the Korean War in the 1950s, RCN destroyers transported Canadian troops and hurled 130,000 rounds at Korean targets, while destroying trains and tunnels on Korea’s coastal railway.
A year before the outbreak of the war, the RCN sent a naval vessel to China as Maoist forces were on the verge of victory in China’s civil war. Part of the objective was to show the U.S. and UK that Canada was a “willing partner in the emerging North Atlantic alliance.”
Royal Canadian Navy in Korean waters, 1952-1954. [Source: legionmagazine.com]
Canada has been a faithful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since its inception in 1949, currently providing it with about $165 million annually. Canada’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, Kerry Buck, boasted in 2018 that “Canada has participated and contributed to every NATO mission, operation and activity since NATO’s founding.”
Many of these missions were highly dubious, including a) NATO’s creation of underground anti-communist armies in Western Europe that carried out black-flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to discredit them; b) NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999; c) its 20-year war on Afghanistan; and d) its attack on Libya in which seven Canadian Air Force jets carried out bombing missions.
Canadian fighter pilots and ground crew in Libya during Operation Odyssey Dawn. [Source: rabble.ca]
In the 1990s, Canada strongly supported NATO enalrgement to the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary and has sent troops to Latvia and Ukraine as part of a belligerent policy toward Russia that has provoked a new Cold War and might yet cause a world war.
Canada and the CIA
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Canada’s Defence Research Board (DRB) had a formal relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which paid for classified research that was carried out by Canadian academics.
This research included CIA-funded psychological studies that were framed as a response to Communist Chinese brainwashing during the Korean War.
Canadian, British and U.S. officials met to coordinate this research at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal on June 1, 1951, where the chairman of the DRB, Donald O. Hebb, suggested that the research focus on confessions, menticide and intervention in the individual mind, which was endorsed by other attendees.
Hebb subsequently received a secret $10,000 ($50,000 in today’s money) grant from the DRB to study sensory deprivation—or isolation of human beings—which was used as an interrogation technique.
The U.S. government and CIA subsequently put up half a million dollars ($2 million today) for McGill psychologist Ewen Cameron to build on Hebb’s psychological isolation research in ghastly ways—including forced isolation and administration of electroshocks on individuals and large doses of LSD and other hallucinogens.
The expressed objective of the research, carried out at Montreal’s Allen Memorial Institute from the early 1950s until 1965, was to erase existing memories and re-program individuals’ psyches. Hebb’s and Cameron’s research ultimately influenced the CIA’s 1963 KUBARAK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, laying the foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture methods.
Canada has assisted the U.S. allowing its landmass and many facilities to be used to test various weapons in the deadly U.S. arsenal, including chemical and biological weapons.
According to John Clearwater, author of the 2006 book Just Dummies: Cruise Missile Testing in Canada, “no matter how bizarre the weapon, no matter how dangerous the test, no matter how contrary the weapon to stated foreign policy objectives, Canada has never refused a single testing request from the United States.”
Starting in World War II, a super-secret germ warfare research facility run jointly by the U.S. and Canada operated at Grosse Îsle, 50 kilometers from Quebec City, which produced rinderpest (a cattle virus) and anthrax spores.
During the Korean War, the Guilford Reed-led Defence Research Board laboratory at Queens studied mosquito vectors and how to produce mosquito colonies, and helped turn shellfish toxins into weapons that were subsequently used by the CIA to try to assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro.
Dr. Guilford Reed in front of Queens University laboratory which helped develop weapons for the CIA that was used to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. [Source: queensu.ca]
Other biological weapons that the U.S. deployed against Cuba were also tested in Canada and, in July 1953, U.S. army planes secretly sprayed 6 kg of zinc cadmium sulfide, a carcinogen, on Winnipeg, and eleven years later did the same on Medicine Hat, Alberta.
When uproar developed in the U.S. over the testing and development of chemical and biological weapons, much of the research was transferred to a secret military research facility north of Suffield, Alberta, where the U.S. Army tested 25-pound shells filled with highly toxic sarin.
Between 1956 and 1984, more than one billion germs of Agent Orange, Purple and White were sprayed on or near a Canadian military base in Gagetown, New Brunswick.
Canadian scientists generally played a key role in helping to develop defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. in Vietnam and the British in Malaya. Among them was Otto Maass, Chemical Biological Weapons (CBW) director at Canada’s Defence Research Board and the Chairman of McGill University’s Chemistry Department from 1937 to 1955.[1]
During the Vietnam War, Canadian manufacturers sold the U.S. military significant amounts of polystyrene, a major component in napalm—a flammable liquid agent that burns the flesh.
The latter was produced during the Korean War at Canada’s Defence Research Chemical laboratories. Canadian scientists working at the time at Suffield discovered a thickening agent for flamethrower fuels (napalm), and worked on development of a flamethrower to deliver this new and improved fuel from tanks.
Napalm strikes in Trang Bang, Vietnam, in June 1972—made possible by Canadian scientists. [Source: apjjf.org]
More Complicity in War
Overall, Canadian industry sold some $12.5 billion in ammunition, aircraft parts, napalm and other war materials to South Vietnam and the U.S. for use during the Vietnam War.
American planes that dropped bombs and napalm were often guided by Canadian-made Marconi-Doppler navigation systems and used bombing computers built in Rexdale, Ontario.
The bombs could have been armed with dynamite shipped from Valleyfield, Quebec. Defoliants came from Naugatuck Chemicals in Elmira, Ontario, and air-to-ground rockets were furnished by the Ingersoll Machine and Tool Company of Ingersoll, Ontario. On the ground, American infantry and artillery units were supplied with de Havilland (DHC-4) Caribous built at Milton, Ontario.
Canadian products also included Beta boots for the troops and the famous green berets of the Special Forces which came from Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto.
1972 Green Beret hat manufactured at Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto. [Source: worthpoint.com]
Supporting the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program
Even though Canada is not officially one of the nine countries possessing nuclear weapons, for years it has supported the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program.
Uranium from Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories and which was refined in Port Hope, Ontario, was used in the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Subsequently, Saskatchewan and Ontario mines supplied a considerable proportion of the uranium used for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
A miner hauls a car of uranium-bearing ore at Eldorado Mine of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, in 1930. [Source: cbc.ca]
In 1952, Canadian officials permitted the U.S. Strategic Air Command to use Canadian air space for training flights of nuclear-armed aircraft. Since 1965, nuclear-armed U.S. submarines have also fired torpedoes at Canadian army maritime bases and test ranges.
Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968-1979; 1980-1984) claimed to be suffocating the arms race but allowed the U.S. to test cruise missiles designed for first-strike nuclear attacks at a Canadian army base in Cold Lake—a policy continued by Brian Mulroney (1984-1993).
In September 1950, the U.S. began storing nuclear weapons at Goose Bay, Newfoundland, while in 1963, Lester Pearson’s government (1963-1968) brought Bomarc missiles to Canada and gave Washington effective control over them.
Pearson had taken power after his Tory predecessor John Diefenbaker (1957-1963) had refused to station the Bomarcs in Canada, and was then threatened by Washington and fell from power in turn.
Canada received significant U.S. backing in establishing its signals intelligence (SIGNIT) capacities. A National Security Agency (NSA) history of the U.S.-Canada SIGNIT relationship released by Edward Snowden labeled Canada a “highly valued second party partner,” which offers “resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA, CSE [Communication Security Establishment] shares with NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S.”
Canada is a member of the Five Eyes surveillance network. [Source: canadiandimension.com]
America First Foreign Policy
Canada has hundreds of military accords with the U.S. The most important, NORAD, has deepened the U.S. military footprint in Canada and committed Canada to acquiring U.S. nuclear weapons for air defense.
In 1965, NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment for U.S. commands worldwide, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it assisted in the War on Drugs.
Canadians posted to NORAD have helped research space weaponry while NORAD has also cooperated in missile defense work.
Many leading Canadian generals have trained in U.S. Army war colleges as the Canadian armed forces increasingly strives for what it calls “interoperability” with the Americans.
A March 2017 dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa to the State Department was tellingly titled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.”
Chrystia Freeland earned her appointment as foreign minister, according to a memo uncovered through a Freedom of Information request, in large part because “of her strong U.S. contacts”; her number one priority was “working closely” with Washington.
Chrystia Freeland, center, and Justin Trudeau, right, with Donald Trump. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that, if the U.S. attacked Canada as in the War of 1812, it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Armed Forces to defend Canadian soil.
According to Engler, Canada’s defense sector ignores the threat from the U.S. because it is not oriented toward protecting Canada from aggression; rather Canada’s “defense community” is aligned with the U.S. Empire’s quest for global dominance.
U.S. invades Canada in futuristic sci-fi series We Stand on Guard. Canada has no protection if this scenario comes true. [Source: usatoday.com]
U.S. Pushes for Higher Military Spending
After former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci was appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada in 2001, he revealed that his only instruction was to press for increased military spending.
During a 2016 speech to the Canadian parliament, then-U.S. President Barack Obama further called on the Canadian government to increase its military spending while, in 2018, Donald Trump sent Justin Trudeau a letter calling on Canada to improve its military preparedness.
A Rogue State
Canada’s status as a rogue state alongside the U.S. is evident in its non-compliance with a UN treaty outlawing mercenaries and the UN’s prohibition of nuclear weapons, which is supported by two-thirds of UN member states. Since 2007, Canada has also abstained on a series of UN resolutions concerning depleted uranium munitions.
Protesters ask why Canada has not signed onto UN treaty banning nuclear weapons. [Source: thecanadafiles.com]
Canadian companies meanwhile have followed their American counterparts in selling weapons to countries that have carried out significant human rights atrocities including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Israel.
Canada has also participated in illegal U.S. coups like in February 2004 when Canadian Special Forces “secured” the airport from which U.S. Marines forced Haiti’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a populist who tried to enact laws to benefit Haiti’s poor—onto a flight to the Central African Republic.
Canadian Special Forces guarding Port-au-Prince airport during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s kidnapping in February 2004. [Source: reddit.com]
Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address applies all too well in Canada.
Canadian companies produce cutting-edge weapon systems and technologies that the U.S. military requires, construct and manage U.S. overseas military installations,[2] and even train the operators of Predator and Reaper drones.
The primary arms-industry lobbying group in Canada is the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), which has 20 staff in Ottawa. It has adopted an intense engagement plan that includes hundreds of meetings with members of parliament, key ministers and the Prime Minister’s office.
Protest outside arms trade show in Ottawa in 2019. [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]
Top U.S. arms makers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications and Raytheon all have Canadian subsidiaries and offices in Ottawa a few blocks from parliament.
Exemplifying Canada’s version of the revolving door, Lockheed contracted with retired Air Force Commander André Deschamps—who had helped direct the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan—to lobby for military contracts in 2017, while Irving Shipbuilding hired former Vice Admiral James King to push for Arctic and offshore patrol ship contracts.
Canada’s economy is dependent on shipbuilding, aerospace, high-tech and mining industries, which all benefit from higher military budgets and tighter integration with the U.S.
The only solution at this time is for American and Canadian peace activists to link up to challenge the military-industrial complex in both countries.
Detailed plans are needed to convert the U.S. and Canadian economies away from militarism and retrain workers and engineers who currently work in the defense sectors.
Restrictions on lobbying and foreign military sales should also be an urgent policy demand along with abolishing NORAD and NATO.
Peace mural in Nova Scotia. [Source: vowpeace.org]
Additionally, the peace movement should work to try to end the glorification of all things military and boycott Hollywood films, government propaganda initiatives and educational institutions that do so, and which dehumanize racial minorities and enemy countries like Russia and their leaders.
Yves Engler writes at the end of his book that “a peaceful world is possible if we want and work for it.” This is indeed true but it will require nothing less than a social revolution to achieve.
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The Xe-100 reactor design (Image: X-energy)
![r/MilitaryPorn - Canada’s JTF 2 guarding the airport at Port-au-Prince, Haiti where a special Canadian Air Force flight will return Canadian citizens home. Angry mobs rampaged through the Haitian capital after President Jean Bertrand Aristide fled the country. February 29, 2004 [1800×1440]](https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/r-militaryporn-canadas-jtf-2-guarding-the-airpo.jpeg?resize=696%2C557&ssl=1)
