Hawks Get Bucks To Sell War

"It has a near monopoly over discussion and programs not only of defence issues, but also IR [international relations studies] within Canadian academe,'' he says, referring to the prevalence of a paradigm inclined toward a long war policy and expansion of the military sector. It's a worry shared by Mark Vorobej, acting director at the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. The problem for conflict resolution programs everywhere, Vorobej says, is that they don't have powerful allies but instead have to shuffle along on ad hoc funding and indifference from university administrations. "We have a solid track record of delivering a substantial bang for the miserly buck the university gives us, but after 17 years, we still do have not a single faculty position,'' says Vorobej, referring to the fact his centre's academic instructors are seconded. Things are certainly lusher at the SDF-supported Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, headed by the oft-quoted David Bercuson, who champions a stronger defence sector and a sustained war against the Taliban. The last 18 months, he admits, have been good ones for advocates of military preparedness. "I'd like to think that we have had some impact on government thinking, both the previous government's and the current one's,'' he says. It's the same sense of satisfaction expressed by Queen's University's Doug Bland, chair of the DND-financed defence management studies program. He helped edit Canada Without Armed Forces?, which was instrumental in a $12.8 billion bump in military expenditures over the next five years in the 2005 federal budget. Have proponents of a stronger military been able to set the tone?, I ask him. "Oh, absolutely," says Bland, "in fact, I just got off the phone for an hour with somebody from CanWest News. The media come to us almost all the time looking for background.'' Kim Richard Nossal, head of political science at Queen's and a member of a committee that decides which centres get SDF funding, believes Langille has got it terribly wrong. But he does admit that defence academics tend not to stray too far from politics as they are now arranged. "At one level Peter is correct. There are very few people who do defence studies from a radical perspective, that is, non-mainstream and critical of the government's perspective.'' One such "non-mainstream'' scholar is University of British Columbia's Michael Byers, an international law expert who's been critical of Canada's current Afghan mission. He talks about the potentially "chilling'' impact DND munificence can have on academic research. That's why he says he maintains a distance from the SDF funds flowing into the campus's Liu Institute for Global Issues, where he is academic director. "Out of respect for my colleagues' freedom of decision making, the only steps I've taken are (a) not to use or benefit from the SDF money, and (b) to request that my name not be listed as part of the UBC stable of experts on applications for renewal of the funding." http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-02-22/news_story.php

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