Letter to the Prime Minister about the anti-missile shield.

French version available there: http://www.cmaq.net/fr/node/18330

Letter to the Prime Minister about the anti-missile shield.

(French version available there: http://www.cmaq.net/fr/node/18330)

To the right honorable the Prime Minister Paul Martin,

Following Bill Graham's (the Minister of National Defence) declaration in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen stating that your government may decide to participate in the American anti-missile shield without consulting the House of Commons, we, as Canadian citizens, would like to express our opinion regarding this issue. First, we ask you in this letter not to take such a critical decision without explicitly obtaining the consent of the Canadian population or of its representatives, the deputies of the House of Commons. Second, we would like to voice our clear opposition to Canada's active participation in this project.

First of all, we believe that the issue of Canada's participation in the anti-missile shield is most important to all Canadians. As you know, this is a very contested question, even within your own party, for several reasons ranging from the manners of spending public money to the worries regarding world peace and Canada's independence from the USA. Within this context, and considering that you are the leader of a minority government, which received only 36.7% of the votes at the last federal elections, we feel that it would be dangerously anti-democratic if you and your cabinet made such a capital decision alone. Therefore we ask you to hold a national referendum regarding Canada's participation in the anti-missile shield, or, at least, a vote at the House of Commons.

Next, we demand that you do not spend Canadian taxpayers' funds on an American anti-missile project for several reasons. First, there is a near consensus within the American and international scientific community that this project is technically unachievable. In addition to its purely technical difficulties, the anti-missile shield would only be able to protect us against specific types of missiles which originate only from a few pre-established states. The experts consider the system to be easy to outwit and not adapted to modern weapons such as chemical or bacteriological ones. Second, the estimated costs of this project are astronomical : they represent several tens of billions of American dollars. We can conceive that some industries and individuals may make profits out of this major governmental spending, but this war project, already doomed to fail, is obviously not the most profitable way to invest Canadian money. Third, if an efficient anti-missile shield was installed succesfully (which is unlikely), we believe that, by increasing USA's military advantage over the rest of the world, it would help to intensify the worldwide race for weapons. Canada's participation would give credibility to the American administration to continue to use force as opposed to diplomacy and to act according to its own will on the international scene. This approach is opposed to the Canadian tradition. Finally, Mr. Graham affirmed that Canada "may regret it" if it did not participate in this project. We think, on the contrary, that Canadians may certainly regret it if they took part in a project of military domination and that Canada would loose its international reputation as a pacifist and honest nation. Our opinion is that peace is obtained by minimizing the number of enemies rather than by maximizing military power.

Mr. Martin, we therefore urge you not to make a decision regarding the issue of Canada's participation in the American anti-missile shield without consulting the Canadian population and the deputies which represent them. We think that there are sufficient arguments to prove that this project is a technological dead end in which an eventual Canadian participation would be inappropriate and detrimental. In regard to Canada's participation in the anti-missile shield, we say : "No thanks !".

Vincent Bouchard [1], Sylvie Brunet [2], Geneviève Choquette [3], David Côté [4], Benoit Hardy-Vallée [5]

[1] Québec Rhodes Scholars 2001, Ph.D student, theoretical physics, Oxford University

[2] Ph.D student, particle physics, Université de Montréal and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

[3] Ph.D. in philosophy at Université de Paris-Sorbonne and regular part-time faculty member at Concordia University and Université du Québec à Montréal

[4] Ph.D student, particle physics, Université de Montréal and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

[5] Ph.D student, philosophy, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris