"Journalist of the Year" exposed as warmongering dimwit

By happy coincidence, yesterday’s Globe & Mail brought not only the news of Doug Saunders’ prestigious honour, but a fresh op-ed by the Journalist of the Year himself! “NATO’s spending targets are out of touch.” Finally! A long-awaited rebuke to those many American Empire Loyalists given multiple column-inches daily to shame Team Trudeau over our woefully inadequate expenditures on US military kit. Our allies are fast losing faith in us. We are no longer a serious player on the world stage. We must be more like Australia and commit tens of billions to a nuclear-powered submarine fleet to augment the tens of billions earmarked for surface combatants and the hundred or so billions destined for Lockheed Martin’s F-35. Those obsessions are reflected daily in the hysteria over Canada’s failure to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP spending target. Then I read his column. What a buzzkill. Sadly, Doug doesn’t dwell on the obvious – that a country that can’t afford to provide adequate health care and housing for its own citizens has no business pissing away such vast sums in return for a pat on the back from Uncle Sam. No, Doug is writing from a much deeper level of profundity. He has discovered that the very nature of war in the 21st century has changed. “Military spending is now primarily a matter of buying arms and munitions to supply other countries engaged in wars we will not join, rather than building up domestic forces for our own defence.” Got it? We don’t have to spend those hundreds of billions equipping the Canadian Armed Forces, because we face no threats and won’t join in any wars regardless. Instead, we need to spend the money so we can send the weapons to Ukraine and Israel, countries that are fighting very expensive wars on behalf of our shared values. Shared values? In Ukraine, Canada connived in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in 2014, and then participated gleefully in the US campaign of goading the newly-installed nationalist government towards conflict with Russia. In Israel, the values displayed in the slaughter of 14,000 children in six months speak for themselves. Enough with the “shared democratic values” horseshit. Our values, and our spending, must prioritize the needs of Canada’s citizens, not the fantasies of Empire propagandists writing in the pages of the Globe and Mail.