[Stopwar-l] StopWar at PNE Saturday / Article on Canadian military spending

[StopWar]

A reminder:

You're invited to join StopWar at the PNE, tomorrow:

Saturday, August 25th, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

We’re meeting on the plaza at the North East corner of Hastings and Renfrew.

Look for our banner, "Peace and Prosperity, Not War and Austerity," and
come and help us pass out stickers and other informative handouts to the
public attending the PNE this weekend.

*

Also, please read this article detailing recent Canadian military spending...

Canadian War Department drones on with summer splurge

by Matthew Behrens

http://rabble.ca/print/columnists/2012/08/canadian-war-department-drones-summer-splurge

With student activists away for summer vacation, it was the perfect
occasion in late July for Carleton University to celebrate a new
$40-million war-training contract. In partnership with war manufacturer
CAE, Carleton's Visualization and Simulation Centre will enable Canadian
Forces to better practice, in the coarse but memorable phrase of former
Canadian warlord Rick Hillier, the fine art of killing people.

In a moment that would have done Orwell proud, Carleton President Roseann
O'Reilly Runte gushed: "This is about saving lives. This is about saving
money." On hand for the announcement was Foreign Affairs Minister John
Baird, who boasted this war-training partnership will advance "Canada's
security interests and...Canadian values around the world."

If such values are so great, one wonders why they need to come out of the
barrel of a gun. But that's a non-issue in a national security state: when
everything comes down to the rhetoric of "saving our way of life" from
some unknown threat and protecting "our soldiers" from the threats we
often arm to begin with, everything becomes justified, from transfers to
torture to starving the poor of billions to pay for the War Department's
high-tech toys.

Such announcements regularly occur on Canadian university campuses, but
hopefully it will spur at Carleton the kind of protest that shut down
similar attempts to exploit bright young minds for nefarious purposes
(such victories occurred at OISE and the University of Toronto).

The Carleton University contract was one of numerous boondoggles announced
during summer break by a Canadian War Department that's busily seeking out
new enemies and new rationales to shield the lion's share of a $23-billion
budget that is unquestioned by all major political parties. The military
is so awash in funds, that last March their expenditures jumped 14 per
cent and no one could explain why.

In May, Canada's Parliamentary budget watchdog remarked that the Harper
government had deliberately misled the public on the costs of the F-35
stealth bombers (a deception built upon bureaucrats within the War
Department also ignoring their own internal warnings that the bomber
project was plagued by serious troubles).

Shortly after, we also learned that War Minister Peter MacKay had also
low-balled government figures by almost seven times when he discussed how
much it cost to drop bombs on the people of Libya (over $350 million at
last count). Needless to say, the Libyan "mission," as it was delicately
called, was an important benchmark for MacKay and the generals, who got to
play with new equipment and push for new weapons programs as a result.