OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER AND MINISTER OF WOMEN & GENDER EQUALITY
Dear Prime Minister Carney and Minister Valdez,
We are writing to you to express our firm opposition to the
federal government increasing military spending, because it will prevent
adequate funding to critical social and environmental programs for Canadians.
In the past decade, Canada's military spending has doubled from
$20 billion in 2014 to $44 billion in 2024. This year, military spending has
increased to $62 billion to reach NATO's 2% GDP target, which has led to mass
layoffs and deep cuts to many federal departments including Environment and
Climate Change Canada, Crown and Indigenous Relations, Fisheries and Oceans,
Global Affairs, Immigration, Refugees, & Citizenship Canada, etc. To reach
5% of GDP, Canada's military spending will shamefully rise to $150 billion per
year by 2035, which will cause further drastic cuts to essential services.
According to the Women and Gender Equality Canada's (WAGE) 2026–27
Departmental Plan, the federal government will slash WAGE's budget from
$407 million this year to $76 million by 2027. These cuts will greatly harm
women, Indigenous, people with disabilities, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people depriving them of crucial services and
programs to advance equality and prevent gender-based violence. The federal
government is planning to cut millions of dollars from WAGE's budget in the
next two years while it boosts the budget of the male-dominated Department of
National Defence by tens of billions of dollars. This misallocation of public
funds to the military from WAGE and other departments will make Canadian
women's, gender diverse, Indigenous, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people's lives more insecure--impacting more than half of the population.
As the United Nations' confirmed in its report, The
Security We Need: Re-Balancing Military Spending for a Peaceful and Sustainable
Future, higher military spending takes away funding from social
welfare, environmental protection and humanitarian aid. Similarly, the IMF has
warned in their April report that
“scaling up defense spending can weaken fiscal and external sustainability and
risk crowding out social spending.” According to Campaign 2000's 2025
report card, poverty in Canada is getting much worse. Nearly 1.4 million
Canadian children are now living in poverty and there is more homelessness
across the country. The Canadian Climate Institute recently reported
that Canada is not on track to meet its Paris Agreement targets to halve carbon
emissions while there are more severe weather events adversely impacting
communities.
We call on the federal government to cut military spending
and cancel the defence
industrial strategy. We want the federal government to adequately invest in
housing, health care, education, the Calls to Action of the Truth &
Reconciliation Commission and the MMWIG Inquiry, public transit, international
aid, and increase the budget for WAGE. We appeal to the federal government to fund
a green, peace care economy that improves the well-being of all Canadians, protects
the climate and environment, and ensures our commitment to UN multilateralism
not militarism. #CareNotWarfare 