The Canada-Wide Peace & Justice Network, made up of over 50 peace, antiwar, social justice and climate justice groups across Canada, demands: “Shut Down the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association (CANA)!”

BACKGROUND

On April 29, 2025 the Canadian elections resulted in a Liberal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney. With a new government sworn in and a cabinet announced, we can already make some observations about what the world can expect from Canada. At a time when humanity faces existential climate threats in the form of forest fires and floods, a continuing global health crisis, and the danger of nuclear war, the countries of the world need to cooperate to avert these crises and create world peace. But what we are likely to get from the Carney government is more support for warmongering by the US empire against oppressed nations in the Global South. Carney has already implemented an “unprecedented rise” in military spending, which will result in more war, occupation, and military destruction to be exported worldwide through Canada’s membership in NATO.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is U.S.-led, nuclear-armed military alliance. From NATO's founding in 1949 to today, NATO has left a trail of death and destruction, especially since 1990 with interventions in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and now Ukraine. NATO weapons are prolonging the war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. Since 2022, Canada has sent about $14 billion in financial and so-called “military aid” to Ukraine to prolong a NATO proxy war against Russia, while taking no steps towards diplomacy with Russia to end the conflict. NATO calls Israel “its vital ally in the Middle East” and continues to send weapons to the Israeli Zionist regime. This is despite apartheid Israel conducting a brutal genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, which has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians including 17,500 children, not mention attacks on the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

NATO interventions have led to failed states, environmental and climate damage, violence against women, and humanity’s largest refugee crisis. NATO allies have wasted trillions on wars and carbon-intensive weapons, enriching the (mainly US) arms industry while exacerbating conflict around the world. To conduct imperialist wars, occupations, covert and overt military operations and crippling sanctions, NATO is the tool that imperialist countries use to manage their war-mongering division of labour.

NATO membership also drives Canada’s rising military spending. In 2014, NATO members pledged to increase their military spending to 2% of gross domestic product (GDP), and now US President Trump and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte call for an increase to 5% of GDP. Over the past ten years, Canada’s military spending has increased 100% from $20 billion in 2014 to over $42 billion in 2024, which is 1.4% of GDP. On June 9^th, 2025, Prime Minister Carney announced Canada would meet NATO's 2% target this year, which will raise Canada's military spending to about $62.7 billion. Imagine what $62.7 billion could do to end Canada's housing crisis, health, and infrastructure crises, not to mention environmental mitigation and providing northern Indigenous communities with clean drinking water!

CANA (the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association)

Canada’s national interests are overridden completely by our membership in NATO and its subservience to US foreign policy interests. One of Canada’s main institutions designed to integrate Canada’s foreign policy, defence, and security with NATO, overriding every national priority, is CANA (the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association). CANA is the largest of all the parliamentary associations in the Canadian Parliament. CANA contains three categories of members: Members of Parliament (MPs), Senators, and Privy Councillors. Privy Councillors are unelected lifetime appointments by Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister, including current or former judges, MPs, Senators, or persons of distinction.

The purpose of CANA is a) to act as a liaison between Canadian lawmakers and the NATO military bloc's Parliamentary Assembly (PA) and b) to keep Canada tightly roped into the US-led military alliance. The problems with CANA are far-reaching:

• CANA creates dependency on NATO is created through advice, intelligence, news, policy, budgets, technologies, and supply chains in which the government of Canada can no longer do foreign policy independently.
• Membership in NATO means Canada’s military engages (for the most part) in wars for US hegemony and profit, attacking oppressed nations and picking targets based on US objectives rather than on Canada’s real national security interests.
• CANA receives briefings and news from NATO whose interest is lying for the purposes of war propaganda, to create an ill-informed or manipulated political class.
• CANA is undemocratic because foreign policy is inherited or dictated from above the nation state, by an unelected foreign body, rife with corruption. The Canadian state and its elected officials ought to be capable of creating a foreign policy without CANA and without NATO.

Tell your MP to NOT join CANA! Canada deserves an independent foreign policy!

Canadians have not been invited to participate in a review of our foreign policy for three decades now. A growing number of people want Canada to quit NATO and develop an independent foreign policy, based on peace and cooperation with all the countries of the world. Why? Although NATO is self-described as a defensive alliance, facts and history reveal a reckless, offensive, and warmongering mafia of countries led by the USA who routinely ignore the UN Charter and international law. NATO members rather believe that might makes right, and that brutal regime change (as in Syria and Ukraine) towards a pro-western and pro-NATO alignment is a good expansionist policy.

As concluded at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly recently held in Dayton, Ohio, we can see further dangerous commitments to the proxy war in Ukraine declared ahead of the upcoming NATO summit in the Hague. This echo chamber is attempting to escalate a situation that is already well beyond Russia’s red line, and thus puts the world on a path towards mutually-assured nuclear destruction.

Rather than re-forming a new CANA, as required following the recent federal election, the Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network, calls for shutting down the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association altogether, and for Canada to withdraw from NATO.

Read the statement: Shut Down the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association (CANA)!

Say "No" to CANA and NATO! Say "Yes" to peace!