Good men

On the last days of school, I talked to a couple of Rawlinson school dads. One’s an agronomist working on community gardens to feed people. The other’s a scientist cleaning up a stretch of contaminated land where a gas station once stood at Oakwood and Earnscliffe. You’d think Canada would back men like them. But the good men in government have other priorities. 

Prime Minister Carney just signed a deal with NATO to spend 5% of our GDP—roughly $150 billion a year—on defense and weapons by 2035. That number, by the way, was a demand from Trump.

I doubt many dads around here would support that. I certainly don’t. Not for my daughters—one just finished first grade, the other’s in university and home for the summer. They deserve a future built on peace, not militarization.

What kind of world are we creating when we hand over public money to arms dealers for the next ten years? One with more assault rifles instead of more community gardens.

More explosives, instead of cleaned-up land and new homes.

Toronto won’t get the federal support it needs to build housing—we’ll be handed fighter jets instead.

There’s a reason defense spending in Canada stayed relatively flat for the past 20 years. In 2003, 80,000 to 100,000 people filled the streets of Toronto to protest the Iraq war. That public pressure kept Canadian troops out of the war.

But this time? No massive demonstrations when they bombed Iran. So, Carney signed an arms deal.

We still have a choice:


(1) Speak up. Say no to war. Invest in gardens, homes, and clean air.
Or
(2) Say nothing and let things happen.

And we all know what happens when good people do nothing.