Thank you for reading our articles about human rights defenders this year, or maybe opening an e-newsletter, joining us on a webinar and/or for following our updates on social media! Together we are all trying to make a difference by engaging in these ways and more.

Our plans for 2022 include more webinars, e-newsletters, articles and social media posts about struggles around the world.

We also want to build on our intervention on Wet’suwet’en territory last month, find volunteers for our frontline projects accompanying defenders in Latin America, produce a research report on Canadian arms exports to Colombia, strengthen our advocacy interventions and so much more!

To do this we need your support. 

We have two platforms to make online donations: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/peace-brigades-international-canada/ and https://pbicanada.org/donations/donate-to-pbi-canada/.

We also welcome cheques mailed to: Peace Brigades International-Canada, 211 Bronson Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1R 6H5.

Thank you again for your support!

Brent Patterson

“If we are alive it´s thanks to PBI, who have accompanied us for years and have been with us in our most critical moments.” – Guatemalan land defender Carlos Morales

Photo: An F-35 flies past the CN Tower in Toronto, September 4, 2021.

It has been anticipated that the announcement on the selection of a new fighter jet for the Canadian military could be made in March/April 2022.

That choice remains to be made by two southern Ontario Members of Parliament, federal Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi and Defence Minister Anita Anand.

Their recommendation will go to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal cabinet deciding between the Texas-built Lockheed Martin F-35 and the Swedish Saab Gripen that would be manufactured in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

It’s widely believed that the F-35 will win because NATO’s interoperability requirements favour American aircraft. The F-35 could also win because U.S. officials will need to “certify” Canada’s procurement decision.

Uncertainty with Build Back Better

That decision could be delayed, however, because of the uncertainty around the legislative timeline for US President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act and the implications its tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs) would have for Ontario’s automotive industry.

The Toronto Star has explained: “Biden’s Buy America plan to almost double federal rebates, to as much as $12,500 (U.S.), for U.S. buyers of all-American EVs would effectively close the world’s biggest consumer market to EVs assembled in Canada or containing Canadian components.”

That article further notes that the auto assembly plants in Oakville, Windsor and Ingersoll “have basically been rescued by EVs.”

Biden and Senate Democrats had wanted the Act passed by Christmas, but Senator Joe Manchin, a crucial Democrat swing vote for the bill, opposes that the tax credit would only be directed toward union-made EVs.

While he has now withdrawn his support for the bill, White House press secretary Jen Psaki affirms: “We will find a way to move forward next year.”

Ford’s EV agenda

Meanwhile, the Canadian Press reports: “Doug Ford is pitching Ontario as the next electric vehicle manufacturing powerhouse, seemingly a far cry from the premier who three years ago cancelled incentives for people to buy them.”

Significantly that article observes: “Where some see contradiction, others see calculated election strategy.”

It further explains: “Ontario’s ‘Driving Prosperity’ plan focuses on repositioning the province’s auto sector to build electric vehicles, as well as establishing battery production here, taking advantage of critical minerals found in the Ring of Fire. It aims to build at least 400,000 electric vehicles and hybrids by 2030.”

That Conservative election calculus is undermined by Biden’s tax credit plan. It also poses a challenge for the federal (and presumably provincial) Liberals.

How the fighter jets fit in

Ottawa Citizen journalist David Pugliese, who reports on military issues, comments: “Enter the Liberal government’s 2017 policy designed to penalize a bidder on a defence procurement if they are doing ‘economic harm’ to Canada.”

Pugliese further argues: “If the Liberals’ own policy is to be followed, the government will be required to consider U.S. actions and their effect on the Canadian economy during the next stage of evaluating the fighter jet bids.”

That means the American F-35 that Biden is pushing for Canada to choose could be at a disadvantage to the Swedish Gripen.

Pugliese adds: “That review could be the hammer [Finance Minister Chrystia] Freeland and [Trade Minister Mary] Ng need to convince the Americans to back off on the tax incentives that would penalize Canadian firms.”

That is a hammer Ford could also choose to pick up.

Ford has already said he himself will go “full tilt” to American governors to exempt Ontario and ensure Biden’s tax credit also applies to Ontario-made cars.

And the readout from a December 16^th meeting between Trudeau and Ford notes: “The Prime Minister and Premier discussed the implications of the United States’ Build Back Better Act, Canada’s work to vigorously defend its national interests, and the potential for economic growth as a result of the production of electric vehicles and batteries in Ontario.”

This issue may not be resolved by the time the writ for the provincial election is dropped in May.

Duncan Wood, a senior adviser to the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, believes Biden’s bill will pass with some version of the tax credit intact and that some accommodation with Canada will be found, but says: “I think it’s going to be a long process.”

Until that “long process” is settled, it’s possible the federal Liberals won’t announce their decision on Canada’s new fighter jet.

And the closer a provincial election gets, the more sense it might make for Doug Ford, with his Driving Prosperity plan and at least 124,000 auto manufacturing jobs in Ontario, to apply some pressure and speak against the F-35 as Canada’s next fighter jet.

—

Additional reading: The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has called for the fighter jet purchase to be cancelled and for those savings to be redirected to “education, health care, human rights, environmental protection, housing, and future-proofing the Canadian workforce through industrial development strategies and skills development, among other initiatives that promote real human security.”

Image by Transnational Institute/Evan Clayburg.

This past June, Peace Brigades International signed this statement with other organizations that expresses concern about the “militarization of borders, particularly in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala.”

Now, Guardian columnist George Monbiot writes: “Worldwide, the number of fenced borders has risen from 15 to 70 since the end of the cold war [around 1991]: there are now 47,000 kilometres of hard frontier.”

He further warns: “This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more.”

Monbiot then raises the point: “The humanitarian effects of these walls are well documented. But their ecological impacts are also devastating. …Border walls are accelerating the extinction crisis and making ecosystems inviable.”

Borders and ecosystem destruction

In October 2020, Indigenous land defenders with Defend O’odham Jewed and the O’odham Anti Border Collective established a highway blockade on unceded Hia-Ced O’odham territory on the Arizona/Mexico border.

The Collective highlighted: “The U.S / Mexico international border cuts through ancestral O’odham homelands. Trump’s border wall is now desecrating those homelands by blasting grave sites, depleting scarce water resources for construction, posing threats to endangered species and committing colonial violence on indigenous lives.”

These land defenders called for an end to the border wall and the immediate demilitarization of O’odham lands.

Borders open to goods, closed to people stripped of their livelihoods

Peace Brigades International is also part of the Cantabrian Coordinator of NGO for Development, an autonomous network of non-profit organizations, which has stated: “We open the borders diligently to all the goods that maintain the consumption demanded by the neo-capitalist system, but we close them, regardless of the deaths and suffering that this causes, to the people who have consequently been stripped of their livelihoods.”

“Migration is an accounting for global violence”

Harsha Walia, the author of Border & Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism, agrees: “More and more people are being forced out of their land because of trade agreements, mining extraction, deforestation, climate change.”

She adds: “What we need to understand is that migration is a form of reparations. Migration is an accounting for global violence. It’s not a coincidence that the vast number of people who are migrants and refugees in the world today are black and brown people from poor countries that have been made poor because of centuries of imperialism, of empire, of exploitation and deliberate underdevelopment.”

And Walia offers this critique: “Borders maintain a massive system of global apartheid. They are preventing, on a scale we’ve never seen before, the free movement of people who are trying to search for a better life.”

Border militarization vs climate justice

It appears clear that governments are prioritizing the militarization of their borders over addressing the climate crisis.

This report by the Transnational Institute found that Canada spent an average of $1.9 billion a year (over the years 2013-18) on the militarization of its borders while only contributing $149 million a year over the same period on climate financing to mitigate the impacts of climate change that drive forced migration.

Similarly, it found that the US spent $19.6 billion a year on the militarization of its borders and just $1.1 billion on climate financing.

Meanwhile, Mexico has deployed 10,000 troops on its southern border, Guatemala has placed 1,500 police and military personnel on their border, and Honduras recently deployed 7,000 police and military to its border “to disperse a large contingent of migrants”.

Other impacts of militarized borders

Along with the ecological impacts of border walls, these massive deployments of troops can have multiple impacts, including aggressions against human rights defenders and social movements, sexual violence against women and girls, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands.

The joint statement on the militarization of borders signed by PBI notes: “There are hostilities, harassment, surveillance, defamation and aggressions against human right defenders, shelters and spaces supporting migrants, even during the pandemic.”

Gustavo Castro, the founder of Otros Mundos Chiapas in Mexico, has also commented: “One of the greatest threats of militarization is the repression of social movements and protest, especially for a region with a long history of organisation.”

And Cata Hernández of the National Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Women in Mexico has also stated: “What we know is that in the past, the deployment of the military has had a negative impact, particularly for women and girls.”

We continue to follow this with concern.

Related reading: PBI-Honduras: The other side of militarisation: human rights violations

Image: USA Today/May2018.