I really think we should rethink what “defense spending” means. You know, buying these strategic weapons like fancy-ass planes and submarines strike me as an enormous waste of money except insofar as they let us assist/participate in foreign wars (generally wars of aggression by our imperialist neighbor). Any foreign power that would or could meaningfully endanger Canada would utterly overrun anything we could field in terms of “conventional warfare.” If we care about defense, we could be spending instead on light infantry and drones. Hell, just with some back-of-the-napkin math, I suspect we could cut our military budget in half, buy everyone a rifle, and still have a quarter of our military budget left to do things like run trainings for would-be defensive volunteer forces. And I don’t just mean shooting. Like…the military could run first aid classes, outdoor survival courses, computer programming, etc. We could pay people to attend and recieve certification…like for-pay boy scout merit badges or something! We could make ourselves the most unappealing target for invasion without spending very much money at all, and skill-up our people at the same time. We could use “defense spending” to make life better here at home at the same time. Instead we’ll buy honkin big guns we can’t do anything with except tag along with the USA.

The whole world under capitalism is mostly corrupt, and has been for a while now, because capitalism doesn’t work. This is not a risk it’s human nature.