Mining, militarism and organizing against the march to war

In the latest episode of the Courage My Friends series, we welcome organizer with the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network Kara Anderson and welcome back Canada organizer for World Beyond War and coordinator of the Arms Embargo Now Campaign, Rachel Small. We discuss Canada’s radical turn toward militarism and its ramping up of defence spending, the many and deep connections between militarism and mining in the mining capital of the world and solidarity organizing against the march to war. 

Reflecting on Canada’s increased defence spending, Small says:

“ Canadian military spending had already doubled from $20 billion to over $40 billion over the past decade … And then last June, Carney gave it an extra $9 billion overnight and then committed to doubling it again over the next decade. So … the number that's kind of being floated around is that the new defence spending would amount to $150 billion per year in the next decade … It's vastly more than the federal government spends on all health and social transfers to all the provinces and territories combined. It's an enormous flow of funding that's pretty unprecedented in Canada since at least World War II. This is an enormous gift to Trump. It's Canada literally doing precisely what Trump demanded Canada do.”

On the link between militarism and mining, Anderson says:

“The playbook for mining is the ways in which colonization itself has perpetuated itself … What is the premise for going into other countries? It's to get resources. And how do you do that? You do that through violence. Like the OG colonial ways. But I think that just reinforces why it's so important to shut things down, like mining … mining is so central to a lot of the violence, the militarization that we see in the world today… You go in, you use violence to take the land, .. and then you use that to make weapons. And then these weapons, again end up in opposite parts of the world, blowing things up … these weapons also end up back in the same communities from which they were mined and they're used to further suppress these communities. ”

About today’s guests: 

Kara Anderson is an organizer with the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network, as well as a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto working on food justice. 

Rachel Small works as the Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, a global grassroots organisation and network working to abolish war and the military industrial complex, is a founding member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, and coordinates the Arms Embargo Now Campaign. She has done grassroots organizing within local and international social/environmental justice movements for nearly two decades, with a special focus on working in solidarity with communities harmed by Canadian extractive industry projects.

Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute. 

Image: Kara Anderson, Rachel Small / Used with permission.

Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased. 

Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy) 

Courage My Friends podcast organizing committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu. 

Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca. 

Host: Resh Budhu.