A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR CANADA: PEACE QUEST URGES PRIME MINISTER CARNEY TO JUST SAY ‘NO!’ TO TRUMP’S ‘GOLDEN DOME’
On May 27, Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) wrote to Prime Minister Mark Carney, urging him to rethink his support for the ill-conceived, hugely expensive, and dangerously reckless ‘Golden Dime’ missile defence system unveiled on May 20 by US President Donald J. Trump. In our letter – full text provided below – we quote articles by former Liberal Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and retire Senator and senior diplomat Douglas Roche, each arguing passionately against Canadian involvement.
Writing in the Globe and Mail on May 22, Axworthy described the ‘Golden Dome’ proposal as a “ludicrous” and “cockamamie” scheme, radically compromising Canadian sovereignty while making arms control more difficult – and nuclear war more likely. “After winning an election,” Axworthy lamented, “on a clear promise to assert a more independent foreign and defence policy – including a move away from reliance on US weaponry, military strategy and security doctrine – this is more than just a baffling development. It’s a betrayal of the vision Canadians voted for.”
What is at the root of this betrayal? The new Prime Minister may seriously believe the ‘Dome’ is technologically feasible and politically desirable – that it will, as he claimed on May 21, “create protection for our cities”. If so, he is simply not ‘listening to the science’ or heeding the warnings of legions of experts operating outside the paid sway of companies queuing for Pentagon contracts. Or he may be more interested in securing contracts for Canadian companies than in truly protecting the country, while also calculating he can earn the President’s respect by supporting his grand misadventure. If so, the chances of such an unconscionable gamble succeeding seem slim. As CBC reported, on May 27 “Trump posted on his Truth Social platform…that it will cost Canada $61 billion US to join the Golden Dome ‘if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation,’ but will cost nothing ‘if they become our cherished 51st State.’”
Douglas Roche’s rebuke (The Hill Times, May 24) was equally stinging, contrasting the new Prime Minister’s willingness to fuel Washington’s technological fantasies of nuclear superiority and invincibility to Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s principled opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s ‘Star Wars’ programme, and Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin’s stand against President George W. Bush’s more modest but still destabilizing pursuit of a magical ’shield’ against nuclear attack. As Roche writes: “This is leadership?
By giving credence to missile defence instead of coming out strongly for arms control measures, Carney is clearly heading down the path already carved out by the military-industrial complex. Canadians have a right to expect their prime minister to work to solve the problems of war, not join in them.”
Peace Quest’s letter to the Prime Minister – copied to Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand, Minister of National Defence David McGuinty, and Cape Breton’s two Members of Parliament, Jaime Battiste and Mike Kelloway – concludes by noting that “the famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists already stands closer to nuclear midnight (89 seconds) than ever. If we allow ourselves to believe that, when we run out of time, technological wonders will save us, we will only bring that final hour closer. So we beg you to look more closely, Prime Minister, and see the ‘Golden Dome’ for what it is: a ‘Doomsday Dome.’ A death trap.”
PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard commented: “We sent our letter on the day the new parliamentary session opened to underscore the need for principled independence and strategic freedom-of-manoeuvre for Canada at a time of acute peril and threat, including from the Pentagon’s nuclear fantasists and the American military-industrial complex. There is simply no short cut to security or survival in the nuclear age: to reduce and eliminate the terrible risks we run every day, we don’t need massive, futile investments in a ‘Golden Dome’ – an Orange Mirage – we need prudent political reinvestments in painstaking, hardworking diplomacy, détente, and, most importantly, disarmament.”
Given the gravity of the issue, and the regrettable brevity of the upcoming, two-week parliamentary session, PQCB calls for opposition parties with a record of prioritising disarmament over rearmament to seek an emergency debate on the ‘Golden Dome’ programme in the House of Commons, and to press for full parliamentary oversight, with guarantees of a vote on any decision to participate. We also call on Cape Breton’s two MPs, and other Liberal backbenchers, to request or support calls for an emergency debate, and to raise the matter with their colleagues and leadership.
Full Text of Letter to the Prime Minister
May 27, 2025
Dear Prime Minister,
On behalf of Peace Quest Cape Breton, I am writing to congratulate you on your recent election victory, to wish you well in your tenure as Prime Minister – at a moment of acute peril for Canada and the world – and to urge you not to mar your government’s beginning with a fateful blunder: supporting the so-called ‘Golden Dome’ ballistic missile defence programme proposed by US President Donald J. Trump.
The project’s promise of dependable protection against nuclear attack is not only technologically fantastical, as the great weight of independent scientific analysis makes plain, it constitutes a cruelly false political promise making a new nuclear arms race – and the large-scale weaponization of space – certain, and nuclear war more likely. Again, scientific expertise – outside the self-serving military-industrial complex – concurs: because such a war will never be survivable, because there simply is no shield or immunity from nuclear winter, the famous Reagan-Gorbachev formula that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought (still rhetorically adhered to by the nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council) will always apply.
It is logically impossible to adhere to that formula – the bedrock presumption of the nuclear taboo in place since 1945 – and at the same time to claim that a nuclear attack can be withstood, that a general nuclear war will not end in the general ruin of humanity. And the claim that you can survive a nuclear war will inevitably be interpreted by adversaries as a boast that you think you can win one, either in a first strike backed by your supposedly invulnerable ‘Dome’ or in massive retaliation, leading, in either scenario, to the deaths of billions and a radioactive climate breakdown respecting nothing so quaint or anachronistic as national boundaries.
The ‘Golden Dome’ scheme was rightly denounced by former Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy, writing in The Globe and Mail on May 22, as “ludicrous” and “cockamamie”. There are many reasons why, as Mr. Axworthy noted, Canada should avoid becoming “locked into a ruinously expensive and strategically reckless mistake.” But the main one is that, by participating, you become complicit is what is either the dangerous delusion or cynical lie that, as President Trump said on May 20, the ‘Golden Dome’ is capable, within the next few years, of “forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland”; that the crash-programme will finish “the job that President Reagan started forty years ago” with his unhinged Strategic Defense Initiative, bravely opposed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
You yourself, Prime Minister, have claimed that Canadian involvement can both technologically and territorially “complete the Golden Dome” and “create protection for our cities,” an assertion of astonishing naiveté – curable, one would hope, by one decent scientific briefing – and a baffling degree of trust in an obviously untrustworthy, overtly anti-Canadian American leader. Even worse, as Douglas Roche, former Canadian Senator and ambassador for disarmament (appointed by Brian Mulroney) wrote in The Hill Times on May 24, your description of the issues involved as “military matters” constitutes a dereliction of political duty that could well lead to catastrophe. “Why is Carney heading down this road?” Roche – an admirer of your record and achievements – wonders in genuine shock: “Does he really believe…that the Golden Dome will work in protecting cities that are scattered 7,700 kilometres apart?” And he cuts to the heart of the matter – in terms of both strategy and morality – in depicting the whole misadventure as “a quantum leap that anticipates space wars and ever more armaments to fight future wars.”
At a prudent minimum, we urge you to pause your support for President Trump’s Star Wars 2.0, and to undertake a comprehensive review of the missile defence issue in a manner respectful of independent scientific expertise, as well as benefiting from perspectives refined over decades of Canadian commitment to strengthening the international nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and arms control regime. That regime reflects the reality that, when it comes to nuclear war, the only ‘cure’ is prevention through the systematic, verifiable denuclearization of world politics, as envisaged in both the nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT), of which Canada declares itself a champion, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states in 2017.
Our group was planning on writing to you closer to the 80th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inviting you to seize such a precious symbolic moment to re-energize Canadian efforts to prevent nuclear war on earth – and in space – and to open a national conversation on the merits of Canada joining the TPNW community of nations. We are reaching out on this matter, instead, as we believe your embrace of Trump’s missile-shield fantasy brings closer the prospect of the first use of nuclear weapons in war for eight decades.
As you will know, the famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists already stands closer to nuclear midnight (89 seconds) than ever. If we allow ourselves to believe that, when we run out of time, technological wonders will save us, we will only bring that final hour closer. So we beg you to look more closely, Prime Minister, and see the ‘Golden Dome’ for what it is: a ‘Doomsday Dome.’ A death trap.
Sincerely,
Dr. Sean Howard.
Campaign Coordinator, Peace Quest Cape Breton
