Warmaking is Canada’s feminist foreign policy

The Trudeau government has militarized the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

Written by: Tamara Lorincz

To mark International Women’s Day, the Trudeau government hosted Ursula von der Leyen, the first female President of the European Commission, with a martial welcome to Canada. The EU President’s visit was a public relations exercise that strategically deployed women and feminist tropes to bolster public and political support for Canada’s continued weapons shipments to Ukraine and the Canada/US/NATO war against Russia.

President von der Leyen who was previously German’s Defence Minister began her trip by inspecting the troops at the Canadian Forces Base in Kingston. With tanks as props in the background, von der Leyen and Prime Minister Trudeau held a joint press conference on the base. The EU President pressed Canada to scale up ammunition production and send more weapons to Ukraine until it “prevails.” Trudeau replied by confirming his “unwavering” support.

The Prime Minister also announced an extension to Canada’s Operation UNIFIER, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF)’s mission that has provided combat training to over 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers since 2015, which von der Leyen lauded. The leaders did not mention that these Canadian-trained and armed Ukrainian soldiers have injured and killed thousands of Russian-speaking minorities in the eastern Donbas region over the past eight years according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.

During the press conference at the military base, Prime Minister Trudeau pointed out that he was accompanied by his “strong female leaders”: Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Defence Minister Anita Anand and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly who sat together in the front row. These three high-profile women have become the charm offensive promoting Canada’s war effort in Ukraine.

Back in Ottawa, President von der Leyen gave a speech to a packed House of Commons. She praised the women fighting in the Ukrainian military and the women serving in the Canadian military as Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre approvingly looked down from the gallery. The EU President ended by calling on parliamentarians to ensure “steadfast military and economic support” for Ukraine.

Members of Parliament and senators gave Europe’s top female militarist a standing ovation and applauded her speech on social media. On Twitter, the Minister of Women and Gender Equality, Liberal MP Marci Ien, called von der Leyen a “trailblazing figure”. Green Party leader Elizabeth May described the EU President’s speech as “amazing” and NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Heather McPherson called it excellent for highlighting “respect for human rights and women’s rights.” Yet, Ien, May and McPherson overlooked von der Leyen’s duplicity and persistent demand for more weapons to the disastrous war in Ukraine.

In the evening, the Prime Minister held a wine and cheese reception for the EU President with parliamentarians and dignitaries at the War Museum. On a stage with a fighter jet mounted overhead, Trudeau and von der Leyen talked about their shared values and support of Ukraine. She asserted without irony that the world cannot be based on “the right of might” though she has been urging Canada and other allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to increase ammunition production and is leading the remilitarization of the EU.

Over the past year, Canada together with transatlantic allies have provided over $113 billion in military and financial aid to Ukraine to fight Russia. Yet, not once on her two-day visit to Canada did von der Leyen or Prime Minister Trudeau mention the need for a ceasefire, a diplomatic resolution or a peace plan to end the war raging in Europe. Instead, for International Women’s Day, the Trudeau government purposefully marshalled the EU’s top female leader to promote more weapons and prolong a war.

The Militarization of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

While the EU President was at the Kingston military base, Canada’s Mission to the United Nations was at a special session on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) at the UN Security Council. Mozambique, the President of the Security Council for the month of March, held a ministerial-level open debate on the theme “Women, Peace and Security: Towards the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Resolution 1325.” Mozambique’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Verónica Dlhovo, chaired the debate and expressed grave concern that countries are backsliding on their WPS commitments.

In 2000, Canada, a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council at the time, helped to establish the Group of Friends of WPS, which worked with grassroots women’s organizations to draft and pass Resolution 1325 to mainstream gender in peace and security matters and increase women’s participation in conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding. In October of that year, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted the landmark resolution on WPS.

Over the past twenty-three years, nine more resolutions have passed to extend the WPS agenda to include ending sexual violence in armed conflict, enhancing women’s roles in post-conflict recovery, deploying of women protection advisers and establishing indicators to monitor the implementation of resolution 1325. Feminist organizations that laboured long and hard for this resolution hoped that its promise of more women and mechanisms for peace would mean less armed conflict. Instead, there has been endless war.

At the UN Security Council, Mozambique’s Foreign Minister Dlhovo invited experts to present and asked countries to assess their implementation of Resolution 1325 on WPS. The first presenter, Sima Bahous, UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director to the Security Council, bemoaned countries’ poor and limited progress. She denounced the coups, conflicts and sexual violence worldwide and the rise of global military to over $2 trillion. Bahous called for a “radical change of direction.”

Regrettably, Canada’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Richard Arbeiter, presented a weak joint statement on behalf of 65 members of the Group of Friends. This informal group is comprised predominantly of North American and European Union countries. Arbeiter said that these countries “support women’s full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership, at all levels and in all stages of political, peace and security processes.” However, Canada’s record on WPS has been dismal.

For the past two decades, Canada has blatantly disregarded the requirements of the WPS agenda. Canada has repeatedly deployed armed force in other countries and has failed to promote women’s leadership for conflict prevention, mediation and post-conflict recovery. From 2002-2014, the Canadian military was engaged in NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan where CAF soldiers turned detainees over to torture and killed civilians including children. CAF covertly participated in the illegal United States-led war of aggression against Iraq from 2003 and is involved in a NATO-led mission in the country today. In 2011, Canada commanded the NATO bombing of Libya that caused a devastating civil conflict and a humanitarian crisis with thousands of people fleeing the country and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. With the US coalition, Canada conducted and fueled thousands of airstrikes against Syria and Iraq destroying infrastructure and killing people from 2014-2019. The Canadian government has never publicly revealed the gender impacts or casualties from these military operations.

Women were also never tasked to prevent or resolve these violent conflicts in which the Canadian government and military were directly involved even though this was required by Resolution 1325. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria remain in crisis and the lives of women and girls were made much worse by these interventions. Yet, there has never been accountability for the displacement, death and destruction that Canada has caused to these countries. Moreover, there is no mention of these military interventions and the harm done in Canada’s latest National Action Plan (NAP) for Women, Peace and Security 2017-2022. In the NAP, the Trudeau government deploys a positive discourse of humanitarianism but hides its warmaking. This year, Canada will be releasing a third NAP for the period 2023-2028, but it is expected that it will continue to militarize the WPS agenda.

Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy facilitates Warmaking

In November 2021, Liberal MP Melanie Joly was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Her mandate letter from the Prime Minister stated that she was to “continue to develop and implement Canada’s feminist foreign policy, advance Canada’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and build on Canada’s leadership to further this agenda on the global stage.” Minister Joly has repeatedly referred to Canada’s “feminist foreign policy” at international meetings and in the media.

Yet there is no Canadian feminist foreign policy statement. There is nothing in writing. Since Prime Minister Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadians have never been consulted on a new foreign policy. Nevertheless, for the past seven years, successive Canada’s foreign ministers starting with Chrystia Freeland have talked about a so-called “feminist” foreign policy without any documentation. Three years ago, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) promised the Women Peace and Security Network-Canada (WPSN-Canada) that the federal government would develop a feminist foreign policy.

In 2020, GAC tasked the WPSN-Canada to hold consultations with civil society. Representatives from humanitarian organizations and peace groups, practitioners, activists and academics from across the country contributed. Two outcome documents, “What We Heard” and “Be Brave, Be Bold,” were produced and sent to the federal government. Women asserted that a sincere feminist foreign policy “must prioritize healthy relations in all aspects of diplomacy, preservation of just societies, and peace and inclusive security.” It must also centre disarmament, demilitarization and decolonization in Canada’s international relations. The federal government pledged to unveil its first feminist foreign policy statement based on this civil society input in the spring of 2021. Yet, two years on, there is still no sign of it.

By contrast, the federal government does have a comprehensive 110-page defence policy. In the spring of 2017, the Trudeau government launched a well-funded months-long consultation process to develop a new defence policy. That June, former Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan released the new policy entitled Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE) in Parliament. It is a plan to spend over $553 billion on the Canadian military over the next 20 years to buy new weapons systems like fighter jets, armed drones and attack helicopters, build new warships, and recruit more soldiers to maintain “high-end warfighting.” SSE is heavily influenced by Canada’s membership in NATO, the US-led nuclear-armed military alliance, and in NORAD, the partnership with the US on continental defence.

Five months after the new defence policy was released, the Trudeau government published its 26-page National Action Plan (NAP) on WPS as required by Resolution 1325. The 2017 NAP entitled Gender Equality: A Foundation for Peace disturbingly asserted that the SSE aligned with Canada’s commitment to WPS by stating, “Canada’s new Defence Policy—Strong, Secure, Engaged—with its focus on gender equality and diversity, is also part of this feminist approach.” The NAP also claimed that the recruitment of women into the military was in fulfillment of the WPS objectives. However, women account for only 16% of the CAF, which remains a male-dominated institution of patriarchal values and state violence and where women continue to face sexual harassment and assault. Women’s recruitment into the military and high-end warfighting are not feminist and subvert the intended goals of the WPS agenda.

More troubling, without any foreign policy statement feminist or otherwise, the Trudeau government’s defence policy has become our de facto foreign policy. The SSE has led to the militarization of the WPS agenda and to an aggressive role for Canada in the world. This month, Defence Minister Anand announced that Canada would get another defence policy update and she launched public consultations until April 30 of this year. This is the federal government’s second review on defence policy in six years. Yet, the government has not held a broad foreign policy review and consulted with Canadians since 2005 and there is no plan to in sight.

Nevertheless, Minister Joly has claimed that Canada’s illusory “feminist foreign policy is not a brand or a label, it’s a lens that we must apply in order to support gender equality, peace, and prosperity globally… it is free from violence.” Joly’s rhetoric does not match the reality. Her so-called feminist foreign policy language deceptively conceals Canada’s belligerence in international relations.

Canada’s backing of coups and coercive economic measures have caused immense harm to the people of targeted countries. In 2004, elite Canadian and American soldiers forced the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti. Haiti remains in political turmoil and the majority of people impoverished. Canada also supported the coup governments in Honduras in 2009, Bolivia in 2019 and Peru in 2022. The Trudeau government again partnered with the US to attempt to overthrow the democratic government of President Maduro in Venezuela in 2019. Canada has implemented harsh illegal sanctions against Venezuela, Syria, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, China and other countries. In an interview this month, Minister Joly admitted that the massive sanctions against Russia were designed for “potential regime change.” These sanctions are forms of economic warfare.

At the same time, Canada and NATO are continuing to arm Ukraine, which risks a dangerous escalation with nuclear-armed Russia. Shamefully, the Trudeau government is refusing to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to help rid the world of the worst weapons of mass destruction because of its membership in NATO, which relies on nuclear deterrence. Yet, the TPNW is considered the first “feminist” disarmament treaty for its gender-responsive provisions and its pursuit of nuclear weapons abolition. Thus, many Canadian women’s and peace groups contend that a genuine feminist foreign policy is incompatible within NATO and that Canada should leave the alliance.

Women Not Talking: Canada’s Shameful Lack of Diplomacy and Peacekeeping

Though diplomacy and peacekeeping are fundamental to the WPS agenda and a feminist foreign policy, they are not priorities for the Trudeau government. Months before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine last February, Joly rebuffed repeated invitations from her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, to meet to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine. Instead, Canada’s top diplomat dismissed Russia’s proposal for negotiations, ignored its security concerns and pushed NATO membership for Ukraine. Then, in January 2022, Canada further exacerbated tensions with Russia by sending special forces, a warship and ammunition to Ukraine and an electronic warfare regiment to Latvia. Last November, Joly again flatly refused to meet with Lavrov at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit or the G20 meeting. Joly’s blatant disregard for diplomacy, which is at its core conflict prevention and peace, defies a feminist approach to international relations.

Minister Joly has also snubbed Canadian feminist peace organizations and failed to include them in any dialogue on peace and security matters. She has ignored many formal requests to meet from the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace (VOW) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Canada (WILPF-Canada). Joly has not responded to repeated letters from these organizations about their concerns over her lack of diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine.

Worse still, Canada is doing very little peacekeeping or peacebuilding with the UN, but is heavily engaged in warmaking with NATO. According to the latest statistics from the UN Peacekeeping Office, Canada is currently ranked 70th with only 59 soldiers wearing blue helmets out of an armed force of 95,000 soldiers and reserves. Despite the Trudeau government’s 2017 Elsie Initiative to increase the number of women in UN peace support operations, Canada contributes only 20 female soldiers. By contrast, Canada has almost 1,000 troops leading NATO’s enhanced forward presence battlegroup at Camp Adazi in Latvia for Operation REASSURANCE. Canadian warships with hundreds of personnel routinely participate in NATO exercises in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic Seas. Canadian fighter jets fly from allied bases in Romania and Poland along Russia’s border. Canada’s and other allies’ expanding military presence in Eastern and Southern Europe over the past decade has greatly provoked hostilities with Russia. The Trudeau government has not engaged in any diplomatic or peacebuilding measures to stop this conflict with Russia as required by Resolution 1325.

Canadian Arms Dealing and Military Spending Hurt Women and Girls

In spite of Trudeau’s gender-balanced government and gender budgeting legislation, Canada’s arms dealing and military spending belie a feminist approach to peace and security. From 2017, Canada began supplying ammunition and military equipment to Ukrainian security forces that intensified the civil unrest in the country, undermined the Minsk Agreements and antagonized Russia. Over the past year, Defence Minister Anand has sent almost $1.5 billion worth of shells, sniper rifles, machine guns, howitzer artillery guns, rocket launchers, hand grenades, missiles, an advanced missile system and tanks to Ukraine. A week after the special UN Security Council meeting on WPS, Anand announced another weapons package to the war-torn country. Canada is donating 8,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition and a dozen missiles to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

In an interview about these Canadian weapons exports to the AFU, Foreign Affairs Minister Joly explained, “It’s not time to talk about peace, it is time to arm them.” Yet, these weapons are fuelling a devastating war and gender-based violence. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been injured and killed. The UN Human Rights Office of the High Commission recently reported that there have been 22,209 civilian casualties: 8,317 killed and 13,892 injured between February 24, 2022 and March 19, 2023. Millions of Ukrainians are displaced and impoverished especially women and children. The Trudeau government has not established any independent oversight of the arms that Canada is transferring to Ukraine, which is required under the Arms Trade Treaty. There also are many distressing reports that the small arms coming into Ukraine are being used in cases of domestic violence.

In March, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its annual Trends in International Arms Transfers report. Canada is ranked 17th highest in the world for weapons exports. In GAC’s latest report on Exports on Military Goods, the value of Canadian arms transfers increased by almost 30 per cent to approximately $2.7 billion in 2021. The Trudeau government also exports weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel, which are countries that oppress women and have terrible human rights records. As Dr. El Jones, Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University and spoken word artist, critiques in her incisive poem “A woman’s going to send the drones,”

A woman’s going to send the tanks

And all of us will give her thanks

Especially weapons manufacturers, banks

And thanks to those suburban moms

A woman’s going to send the bombs

I’m glad a woman is so strong

It is Canada’s feminist neoliberal leadership that is driving weapons exports and war.

As well, Canada’s supposed gender-sensitive government disproportionally spends more for the hard power of the military than the soft power of diplomacy. Over the past decade, military spending has increased by 70% to $35 billion annually, which is 1.2% of GDP. At this level, Canada is ranked 13th highest in the world according to SIPRI’s latest Trends in World Military Spending. NATO’s demand that allies meet or exceed the 2% GDP target is the main driver of Canada’s rising military expenditures. By contrast, the Trudeau government spends only $8 billion for the Department of Global Affairs that includes the $5 billion for Canada’s contribution to overseas development aid of which $800 million is for feminist international assistance. Worse still, the Department of Women and Gender Equality receives a paltry $219 million.

Yet, in 2018, the Trudeau government passed the Canadian Gender Budgeting Act. Article 2 of the Act obliges the government to consider gender and diversity in resource allocation decisions. In this year’s federal budget, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland ignored the gender impacts and opportunity costs of military spending. She announced a $55 billion increase to the defence budget to meet Canada’s NATO and NORAD commitments over the next twenty years. This includes the $19 billion deal for fossil fuel powered F-35 fighter jets and an additional $7 billion for new military infrastructure across the north though Indigenous people in northern communities live in unsafe housing and the climate crisis is worsening.

More public funding to the male-dominated institution of the Department of National Defence is detrimental to the security of Canadians. Freeland is diverting public resources away from what is most needed: healthcare, affordable housing, education, climate action, peacebuilding and international assistance. Budget 2023 starkly shows that the Trudeau government over-spends on the military and under-invests in programs for women and peace.

Grassroots Women’s Groups Resist and Reclaim Feminist Foreign Policy

Grassroots women’s peace groups like VOW and WILPF are not fooled by the feminist foreign policy charade of the Trudeau government. They know that it masks Canada’s continued weapons exports and warmaking with the US and NATO. The carefully choreographed visit by EU President von der Leyen to Canada for International Women’s Day was emblematic of this purposeful conjoining of feminism with militarism. Yet, as Professor of International Relations and Director of Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace and Security, Jacqui True asserts:

“Above all, foreign policy worthy of the adjective ‘feminist’ must support and resource non-militarised solutions to conflict and challenge the self-interested masculine hegemonies in the state and private sector that perpetuates the business of killing.”

Canadian women’s peace groups are resisting and working hard to reclaim feminist foreign policy and the WPS agenda from the militarists. They are advocating that the federal government dismantle the patriarchal structures of violence and build new feminist structures of nonviolence and cooperation. In Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, Ray Acheson explains how the process of demilitarization can transform a country and create the conditions for human security and peace. Military spending must be reduced and re-allocated to domestic social and environmental programs, climate financing and foreign aid. The government must establish a Department of Peace, a Minister of Peace, an Ambassador for Disarmament among other measures.

Canada also needs a foreign policy review with a truth and reconciliation process. There needs to be accountability and justice for the harm that Canada has caused to other countries. To develop an independent foreign policy based on feminist values, Canada must withdraw from NATO and NORAD. To make this happen, Canadians must create a mass movement for change and compel the Trudeau government to stop its warmaking and start peacebuilding. For it is only with a real feminist foreign policy that Canada can work with other countries to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, meet the urgent climate targets under the Paris Agreement and bring about a better and more peaceful world.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

We’re aiming to get up to $4000 CAD per month in support, up from $1423 CAD per month at present.
Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

Tamara Lorincz is a PhD candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She is also a fellow with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.

More Articles

Featured