Arms dealing is a bad idea.

War is good for weapons industry profits and bad for people. Why? Because war kills people and deprives people in and out of war zones of necessities of life.

To overcome this contradiction and convince us that manufacturing and selling weapons is a good idea, a narrative is required. We must be told over and over until it is firmly pounded into our minds that we have an enemy so evil, so threatening, and so bent on world domination that selling arms to our allies and making war on him is the only way to preserve our way of life and help defend our friends from being swallowed by this monster.

This narrative is particularly cynical when the evil monster we are told to defend ourselves against is actually defending his country from us, as is the case with the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

"Bolstering" the economy by selling weapons on the false pretense that targets of our and our allies' aggression are aggressing against us is not only dishonest but the least efficient and most socially destructive economic policy there is.

Mr. Carney's government stooping to this level is not a surprise judging by the fact that Canadian governments have been "bolstering Canada's economy" since 2001 by pumping up a housing price inflation – to the point where Canadians can pay no more for housing – with near-zero BOC overnight rates and increasingly complex CMHC mortgage securitization instruments that have hoovered trillions of dollars out of Canada's productive economy into economically useless dead weight hoarded by Canadian banks, insurance companies, pension funds, REITs, the top 1% of Canadian earners, and other institutional so-called "investors."

Mr. Carney claimed in his January 20, 2026, speech at Davos that Canada has "the most educated population in the world." What he actually meant is that Canadians are so thoroughly indoctrinated in Atlanticist warmongering narratives that we will believe anything.

Suppose, though, that Canadians actually were the most educated people in the world.

In that case, Canadians might find answers to scientific, technical, and engineering questions necessary to create products of actual use to humanity that would "bolster" our economy orders of magnitude more powerfully than dealing weapons can – absent the death and destruction inherent in the nature of weapons and war – and contribute to solving problems in sectors such as renewable energy, sustainable materials, and innovative processes that lower the cost and increase the abundance of inputs essential to industry.

Manufacturing weapons, arms dealing, and brainwashing entire populations with projected boogiemen – every accusation being a confession – to justify this is so dishonest, anachronistic, cynical, and destructive I wish I were surprised that Mark Carney's government is turning to war profiteering to "bolster" our economy.

A better policy for Canadians is to leverage Canada's historical and cultural commonalities with the UK and EU to mediate negotiating a solution to precisely what the root cause of the war in Ukraine is, namely the absence of and urgent need for a European security architecture that is not predicated – as NATO is – on hostility toward Russia.