Canada’s Liberal government, led by the blue-chip executive and central banker Mark Carney, plans to militarize the economy and embed the armed forces in all areas of social life. This goal was underlined by the allocation of vast new sums in this month’s federal budget to building up the armed forces and Canada’s military-industrial base, and by the recent revelation that Ottawa is planning to create a massive 300,000-strong military reserve for deployment in an emergency.

The military build-up that Canadian imperialism is plotting will entail a frontal assault on the working class, its social position and living standards. As Canada’s Globe and Mail, the mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite, put it in a November 12 editorial, “Business and labour will need to take risks and tighten belts. And when disputes arise, all sides must walk the path of compromise to achieve a common purpose. In a word: sacrifice.”

The only “sacrifice” possible in a capitalist society in which profits are extracted from the labour power of the working class and appropriated as private profit is the complete subordination of the working class to austerity and war. Alongside its imperialist allies in the United States and Europe, Canada’s ruling class is planning to wage a war or wars of aggression against Russia and China by 2030. This will require a massive increase in the rate of exploitation of labour, as the economy is reorganized for rearmament and war, and the state suppression of strikes and other form of working-class opposition.

There is no significant opposition to this incendiary agenda within the ruling class. All are agreed that Canada must be a protagonist, as it was in the two world wars of the last century, in a new imperialist partition of the world, so as to lay claim to markets, resources, production networks and geostrategic influence.

The Canadian government is thus moving to place the economy on a war footing.

It has created a new “Defence Investment Agency” to accelerate the transfer of wealth socially created by the working class into procuring armaments, “supercharging innovation in aerospace, shipbuilding, and advanced manufacturing,” in its own hackneyed parlance. According to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, “Every company in the country should basically have a defence strategy.”

Champagne’s budget provided $6.6 billion to the government’s new Defence Industrial Strategy. This will be used to support research on new weapons-systems and as seed money to rapidly expand Canada’s military-industrial base. Ottawa wants to ensure that Canadian capital can cash in on the global surge in armaments spending, as well as benefiting handsomely from the hundreds of billions it plans to spend over the next decade on procuring new fleets of attack submarines, warships, fighter jets, surveillance and attack drones and other weaponry.   

Faced with global trade war and mounting layoffs across Canadian industry, the government is touting military spending as a key component of its strategy to “grow” the economy. What a fraud! Rearmament will be paid for through massive social spending cuts and tax rises, will embolden the ruling class in hurtling to the precipice of global war, and only further enrich the arms merchants and various politically well-connected operators.

Earlier this month, a newly created Canadian company, Nalagx announced plans to build the largest explosives factory in Canada since WWII in cooperation with France’s state-owned Eurenco. The joint venture will supply Canada, France and other NATO powers with artillery shells and gun ammunition. “Our agreement,” said Nalagx CEO and former Liberal MP Patrick Gagnon, “is a concrete illustration of the rebirth of the defence industry in Canada.”

Montreal-based Bombardier is in negotiations with Saab to build its Gripen fighter jet in Canada to fulfill potential orders from the Canadian and Ukrainian militaries. Bombardier and Saab are already partners in Saab’s “Global Eye” surveillance jet, which uses Bombardier’s 6000/6500 business jet as its platform.

Massive military spending hikes and a 300,000-strong reserve

The Carney government’s 2025-2026 budget, which parliament approved earlier this month thanks to the connivance of the New Democrats, Greens, and trade union bureaucracy, is meant to kick-start a massive decade-long hike in Canada’s military spending.

In just the current fiscal year, the Carney government has increased defence spending from 1.4 to 2 percent of GDP. But it is also vowing to quickly go far beyond that and hike Canada’s defence expenditure to 5 percent of GDP or $150 billion annually by 2035.

In its budget, the government committed $84 billion in new military expenditures over the next five years, while making clear this is just an initial down payment. The new expenditures include $19 billion to upgrade military bases and other infrastructure with a focus on Canadian Navy ports and the Arctic; $17.9 billion on new weapons systems; $10.9 billion to wage cyber warfare; and another $6.2 billion on military aid to Ukraine’s corrupt, Nazi-ridden regime. The Carney government is framing these expenditures as “investments” in “the defence of Canadian sovereignty,” which in reality means the defence of Canadian capitalism and its profits, both against its imperialist rivals and the working class at home.

A further $20.4 billion will be directed towards recruitment of new soldiers and the retention of existing ones through pay raises. The lowest ranks will see their pay increase from $43,368 to $52,044 annually. To put this in its proper, class perspective, the top 100 CEOs whose dominant social position these soldiers will be defending with their lives earn an average of $62,660 in a single day.

Ottawa is also planning to build up a massive reserve military force, who at least until mobilized in active operations, would be an unpaid, bare-bones volunteer force.

The Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese has revealed the existence of a heretofore secret “Mobilization Plan” to enlist up to 300,000 civil servants and civilians into the Canadian Armed Forces “Supplementary Reserve” force. This force currently consists of a mere 4,384 retired or former CAF soldiers. The organized reserves are also to be dramatically expanded to 100,000 from 23,500 today.

These unprecedented plans would put 1 percent of Canada’s population under military command. They are being undertaken entirely behind the backs of the public. The mobilization plan was “signed by Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan and defence deputy minister Stefanie Beck on May 30, 2025,” according to Pugliese.

In other words, within days of its election on April 28, the minority Carney Liberal government was secretly planning for Canada’s direct participation in a great-power or world war. A so-called “Tiger Team” within the Department of National Defence was created on June 4 to implement the plan. The Globe and Mail subsequently revealed that implementation will begin in the spring of 2026.

According to the Ottawa Citizen, “public servants would be required to do one week’s worth of military training each year but would not be issued uniforms… The training focus would be on “basic skills (e.g. shoot, move, and communicate; drive a truck; fly a drone: etc.).”

As absurd as these plans may seem on their face, with the caricature of “civil servants” with guns being widely mocked, workers must take them as seriously as the ruling class does.

The head of the Canadian Armed Forces, General Jennie Carignan, remarked to the press that, “We are really looking at our own sovereignty, territory, and having those resilient communities who know where to go should anything happen, from pandemics to floods to a missile strike.”

This poses the question: what foreign provocations is Canadian imperialism planning, along with Washington and their NATO allies, that would result in a missile strike on Canadian soil? The answer is not hard to find. The Canadian military has been at the forefront of imperialist operations against Russia. Canadian forces lead NATO’s international military brigade in Latvia, and have armed and trained Ukraine’s right-led military, including helping to integrate pro-Nazi militia under Operation UNIFIER. Canada is also deeply integrated into the preparations of the US, and its chief Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, for war with China.

In recent months, Carney has worked closely with Paris, London, and Berlin in the “coalition of the willing” that the principal European imperialist powers have created to ensure the NATO-instigated war on Russia continues. Last week, the head of France’s military, General Fabien Mandon declared that France must be “ready to lose its children,” and “suffer economically” if it is to prevail over Russia. These remarks were met with public outrage, but were defended by French President Emmanuel Macron and his government.

A “Whole of Society Approach”

Military leaders in the imperialist countries are unabashed in demanding a so-called “Whole of Society approach” to fighting wars. According to the CAF’s Mobilization Plan, this requires the creation of a “servant culture around sovereignty and public accountability” that “will necessitate shaping, facilitation and engagement with the Privy Council Office, other government departments and agencies as well as socialization with the Canadian public.”

Translated into plain English, this means that the Canadian government plans a massive propaganda campaign to force the working class to accept its war of choice. The government’s model in this fascistic endeavour is Finland, “a recognized leader in this area.”

The citing of Finland, a front-line state in NATO’s advanced preparations for a war with Russia, as an example to follow is extremely ominous. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in April, “The Finnish government has repeatedly spoken positively of Finland’s alliance with the Nazis during World War II. A key theme of (Finnish President) Stubb’s remarks in Kiev on the third anniversary of Russia’s US-provoked invasion of Ukraine was that it was a tragedy that Finland, and by implication its ally, Nazi Germany, lost to the Soviet Union.”

Canadian imperialism is no shrinking violet when it comes to embracing Nazis, as the World Socialist Web Site has extensively documented. The intractable crisis of world capitalism is once again driving the Canadian ruling class to bring forward and co-opt the most reactionary, socially backwards elements.

On November 11, the anniversary of the Armistice which officially ended the First World War in 1918—a day that has been transformed into an occasion for the glorification of warfare by Canadian imperialism—the Globe and Mail published an article entitled “Poland’s Trigger Point.” It was a paean to the “whole of society” approach to the militarization underway in that country. The feature painted a glowing picture of Poles eagerly practicing their marksmanship and training in the martial art of “Krav Maga” developed by the Israeli Defence Forces.

Significantly, the article lends credibility to the leadership of the Polish “preppers” movement, “a collection of hundreds of survivalists who share tips on how to live in the wild and were once considered by many as crackpots. Now, Mr. Czuryllo has been flooded with inquiries about ‘prepping’ and he’s giving weekly survival courses to families, corporate executives and municipal employees.”

The fascists from the CAF’s “Vandoo” regiment who were arrested in July by the RCMP were also “preppers” preparing for a violent social breakdown. If they were not currently facing multiple terrorism and weapons charges based on their plans to “seize land” and form a fascist anti-government militia, these would be the people the Globe and Canada’s military would like to have giving lessons in hand-to-hand combat to those induced through their militarist-nationalist propaganda to enlist in the massive, soon to be launched supplementary reserve.

The working class must face hard facts. There is no anti-war political constituency within the Canadian ruling class, and no possibility of a turn away from world war within the confines of capitalist social relations and bourgeois parliamentary politics. The social-democratic NDP’s last impotent squeak feigning opposition to Carney’s commitment to spend 5 percent of GDP on war by 2035 was issued in June. But this was not an anti-war statement, merely a quibble about sums. “Carney’s new pledge would cost Canadians more than $100 billion per year,” the NDP complained, while agreeing “that Canadian Armed Forces personnel and infrastructure were underfunded by successive Liberal and Conservative governments, and there is a need to increase investment in these services.”

On November 17, the same day the NDP helped ensure the adoption of Carney’s budget of austerity and war, British Columbia NDP Premier David Eby released an “industrial strategy” for the province largely focused on ensuring that “BC gets its fair share” of Canadian imperialist rearmament.

The working class must break decisively with these warmongers, and build its own independent, revolutionary socialist leadership, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its Canadian section, the Socialist Equality Party, so as to put an end to capitalism and the threat of a catastrophic global conflagration.