Canada intends to sign on to the ReArm Europe procurement pact by July 1
Photo: “Canada out of NATO: fund health care not warfare” banner outside the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa, May 28, 2025, as Canadian Defence Minister David McGuinty promises in this speech a “forthcoming Defence Industrial Strategy” and “to triple defence spending from 2014 levels by 2030.” Photo by Koozma J. Tarasoff.
CBC News reports: “On Tuesday [May 27], [Canadian prime minister Mark] Carney told CBC’s Power & Politics in an interview that he hopes Canada will be able to join ReArm Europe, a major defence procurement pact, by July 1, in a step to reduce the country’s dependence on the United States for weapons and munitions.”
CBC then notes: “That plan foresees European countries spending $1.25 trillion on defence over the next five years.”
CTV adds: “The European initiative would leverage loans and investments into domestic defence industries.”
More specifically, Global News explains: “The ReArm Europe plan [announced by the European Union in March] includes a loan program worth about $235 billion to be called Security Action For Europe (SAFE), which would allow countries to work with others outside the European Union to jointly buy or build arms.”
From now to July 1
The CTV article further notes: “Speaking to CTV News outside [the] CANSEC [arms show in Ottawa], [Canadian defence minister David] McGuinty said he would be at NATO next week in Brussels [NATO defence ministers will meet on June 5], and the prime minister will meet the consortium at the end of June.”
The “consortium” presumably relates to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit that will be held in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 24-25, 2025. On June 21 and 22, the Counter-Summit Coalition for Peace and Justice in The Hague is organizing a protest and counter-summit to challenge this NATO summit.
European opposition to ReArm Europe
On March 26, 2025, Peace Brigade International-Spanish State, along with nearly 850 organizations and 16,000 individuals, signed this letter that opposes the European Commission plan to “ReArm Europe”.
Signatories of the letter also include Greenpeace Spain, Mundubat, ATTAC Spain, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Spain, and the Observatory of Peace and Human Rights-University of Tolima.
The letter asserts: “The rearmament of Europe will not bring peace, it will not contribute to détente, but it will bring us even closer to war. Militaristic contexts are also often accompanied by setbacks in rights, freedoms and social policies, causing fear and social alarm, an ideal scenario for normalising mechanisms of repression and authoritarianism, as we are already beginning to see.”
It also provides this critique: “This Europe which is silent or, worse, supports Israel in its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and even persecutes those who denounce it, needs to clearly redefine what are those common values whose defense is put forward as a justification for rearmament.”
The letter concludes: “We do not resign ourselves to war, because we do not want the peace of the cemeteries, because history shows us that the only realistic way to achieve peace is not military, but political.”
The full letter signed by our colleagues at PBI-Spanish State can be read at Manifiesto: ‘No nos resignamos al rearme y a la guerra en Europa’.
We continue to follow this.
Additional reading: The Guardian reports: “The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of a hundred individual countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the huge civilian death toll, new research reveals.”
Photo: Palestinian and Quaker activists hold a “No War, No Warming” banner outside the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa, May 28, 2025. Photo by Koozma J. Tarasoff.
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