Unpacking Canada’s Complicity in Nuclear Spending: No, We Can’t Trust Our Government.

By Kristine-Claire Bolisay & Althea Robert Arevalo

Across Canada and most of the western world, we are taught to trust our leaders with the hope that they will choose the right paths that lead to peace. We are expected to have faith that our elected officials will act morally and responsibly, making choices that serve the interests of the people and fulfill the pledges they made during their campaigns. In recent years, however, through decades of Liberal and Conservative governments alike, the Canadian government has repeatedly bowed to foreign pressures, increasing its military spending at the expense of its citizens. It has also turned a blind eye to the humanitarian catastrophes overseas. If we truly wish to march towards a safer, more peaceful world, free from nuclear wars and complicity in violence, we must face a hard truth. Our leaders are not making moral choices for us. They must be held to account by ordinary people who demand peace over profit, diplomacy over escalation, and justice above all else.

To begin, we must go back to the 1950s, during the tenure of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, when Canada struggled to define its role in the nuclear age. Diefenbaker’s minister of defence pushed for a joint air defence initiative with the United States. This was known as the North American Aerospace Defence Command policy, or NORAD, and was created without consultation with his cabinet. To fulfill his NORAD commitments, in the late 50s Canada pledged to significantly increase military spending, which included sharing missiles with and acquiring nuclear weapons from the United States. The Bomarc missiles in particular were exclusively designed to carry nukes. By 1958, the Canadian Defence Policy suggested that Canada was intending to obtain American nuclear weapons. President John F. Kennedy fully encouraged this direction, and by the early 1960s, the liberal leader of the opposition, Lester B. Pearson, was committed to Canada acquiring nukes to meet NATO obligations. But Canadians resisted: tens of thousands voiced their opposition by sending letters and petitions to Diefenbaker in protest. Even his own cabinet was divided and was unable to form a concrete decision on the matter. And in 1963, the Bomarc Missile Crisis inevitably lost Diefenbaker his vote of confidence in the House of Commons, and he was forced to step down as Prime Minister. Though Canada later ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1969, phasing out its missiles, we still remain under a NATO umbrella and have not made any meaningful steps towards total nuclear abolition.

Fast forward to today, under Mark Carney’s Liberal government, we are still miles away from achieving peace and nuclear disarmament. NATO leaders across the West have recently just approved a new defence plan to allocate 5% of our GDP to defence spending annually for the next ten years, much to Donald Trump’s satisfaction. A 5% benchmark means over 150 billion dollars per year over 10 years. Dave Perry from the Canadian Global Affairs Institute says we haven’t seen an increase this massive since the last World War. It is over triple the amount we currently spend on our military. That’s 150 billion dollars that could be used to house our unhoused, feed the hungry, finally provide clean drinking water to reserves, and more. Instead, this money will be used to strengthen NATO’s military capabilities, potentially buying more F-35 fighter jets with the capabilities of carrying nuclear arms, something Donald Trump himself has pushed NATO allies to do for years. Proving that once again, Mark Carney is ready to have Canada do anything America asks of us. And it won’t just be Canada. There are 32 countries that are members of NATO and 31 countries pledging their 5% towards military spending. That’s every NATO member other than Spain, who bravely objected to this proposal at June 2025’s NATO summit.

With geopolitical tensions the way they are today, diplomacy should be our government’s highest priority, not funnelling public resources into weapons. Especially not for weapons capable of wiping out cities in seconds, reducing them to nuclear wastelands, killing thousands, and subjecting their people to generations of trauma, with heightened risks of cancers and infant mortality. Yet our government has proven time and time again that its priority is not peace, it’s not nuclear disarmament, it’s to bend to the will of NATO pressures once again and escalate an arms race.

The situation in Gaza has deteriorated so rapidly, and Canada has made no effort to slow their efforts supplying arms to Israel. The United Nations reported that the Palestinian people have reached stage 5 of food insecurity in July of 2025. A “catastrophe,” categorized by starvation, destitution, and death. And nuclear-armed countries will turn the other way again and again to these countries facing genocides, famine, and war. When our government shows little to no remorse for human life, we must question how far they’ll go. How willing are they to use their nuclear weapons? Especially when Israel is estimated to possess at least 90 nuclear weapons, though they’ve refused to admit to it. It’s believed their weapons are being reserved for something bigger, a last resort known as “The Samson Option”: a murder-suicide attack featuring an arsenal of nuclear weapons, including land-based and sea-based missiles. Unlike the doctrines of mutually assured destruction, this operation would exclusively target non-nuclear nations. Israel is the only country in the Middle East in possession of nuclear weapons.

Canada has done far too little for Palestine, and it is far too late. In September 2025, Canada officially recognized Palestine as a state. This action from our government was long overdue and comes after over 72,000 deaths, most of whom being children. Yet, Canada has made little effort to impose a full weapons embargo on Israel, making our government complicit in this genocide. Despite Carney’s claim that this two-state solution will lead to peace, what good will it do if we keep supplying Israel with tools for destruction?

It is abundantly clear that we, as citizens, can’t blindly trust that our government will make the moral decisions we wish they’d make for us. In the face of this mountain of evidence of military spending and dangerous alliances, it’s clear that we can’t depend on a government that trades diplomacy for dollars. And so, this responsibility falls to us, all of us citizens. We must use our voices, our actions, and our protests to lead to change; we cannot wait for our leaders alone to take us there. Our silence, like our government’s inaction, is our complicity in the nuclear arms race, and our resistance can and will lead to the future of peace and disarmament that we deserve.

References

Brewster, Murray, and Peter Zimonjic. 2025. “Canada Promises to Spend 5% of GDP on Defence by 2035 in Pact with NATO Leaders.” CBC. June 25, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-agrees-five-percent-gdp-defence-spending-1.7570191.

Brewster, Murray. 2025. “NATO’s 5% benchmark would cost Canada $150B a year, Carney says.” CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nato-leaders-summit-1.7568938.

Dilawar, Arvind. 2024. “The Samson Option: Israel’s Plan to Nuke Its Opponents.” The Progressive. https://progressive.org/latest/the-samson-option-israels-plan-to-nuke-its-opponents-dilawar-20240624/.

“In Gaza, mounting evidence of famine and widespread starvation.” 2025. UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165517.

Lyons, Emmet, and Kierra Frazier. 2025. “Canada says it plans to recognize Palestine as a state, joining the U.K. and France.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-recognize-palestine-state-france-united-kingdom/.

“Nato agrees spike in defence spending and stresses ‘ironclad’ security guarantee.” 2025. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4en8djwyko.

“The Nuclear Question in Canada – Diefenbaker Canada Centre.” 2025. Diefenbaker. 2025. https://diefenbaker.usask.ca/exhibits/online-exhibits-content/the-nuclear-question-in-canada-en.php.‌