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Remembrance Day, redacted

Canada’s growing network of secret military bases raises troubling questions about accountability, legality, and remembrance

Canadian Dimension: Morgan Duchesney - November 11, 2025

On November 11, Canadians honour the terrible sacrifices made by the nation’s living and departed veterans. That remembrance ought to include all military casualties—not a redacted roster.

Future Remembrance Day ceremonies are unlikely to name elite military casualties, as successive governments have been remarkably silent about Canada’s secretive overseas deployments. The lone exception came in 2007, when officials admitted that a Canadian commando in Afghanistan had died while repairing a communications tower.

There is understandable hesitation to scrutinize military missions when soldiers are being killed or wounded abroad. Yet precisely because military members are discouraged from questioning orders, civilians must do so on their behalf, lest more lives be sacrificed for the political or financial gain of those issuing commands and profiting from military adventurism.

Prime Minister Mark Carney now faces US pressure to boost military spending, and domestic pressure to fund it through cuts to social programs and the public service. Corporate media, business lobbies, and sympathetic think tanks are falsely portraying social spending as a threat to national security.

This position reflects elite allegiance to a neoliberal economic order that empowers capital at human expense. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund have long helped transnational corporations dominate weak but resource-rich states by tying development loans to favourable tax regimes, environmental deregulation, and cuts to social programs.

Meanwhile, extreme weather events across the Global South are worsening the crisis, spurring economic collapse and forcing desperate populations to migrate toward Europe and the United States. Wealthy nations such as France, Italy, and Britain—long enriched by colonial exploitation—are responding with hostility rather than compassion.

Another disturbing feature of neoliberalism is its normalization of brutal counter-terrorism tactics first pioneered by the Nazis in occupied Europe, and later adopted by American and Allied forces to ensure that elite business interests continued to dominate post-war Europe and its colonies.

Since the Second World War, counter-terrorism has served as a tool for northern governments to collaborate with local elites in “domesticating” the legitimate aspirations of working people in the Global South.

Canada’s security assistance to the Palestinian Authority is a prime example, supporting indigenous collaborators who undermine their own people at the behest of an occupying power like Israel.

National security states such as the US and Israel have become global leaders in exporting counter-terrorism methods tested on Arab, Asian, Latin American, and African populations, often under cooperative tyrants praised as “moderates” by northern powers. Canada’s elite military units are increasingly integrated into these operations.

Over the past decade, Canada has joined the US in building a global network of military “hubs” meant to “project combat power” for conventional missions, counter-terrorism, and, most recently, hybrid warfare, a strategy combining propaganda, misinformation, and cyberattacks with conventional and proxy forces.

Ironically, hybrid warfare tactics used by American, Israeli, and British Special Forces are perfectly acceptable to official Ottawa, while identical Russian strategies in Ukraine are roundly condemned.

Canada already maintains bases in Germany, Kuwait, Jamaica, and Senegal, with further hubs planned in Eastern Africa and across Asia. These sites serve as staging grounds for elite Canadian troops operating under US command, further insulating their actions from public scrutiny or democratic oversight.

Successive governments have expanded the size and budgets of units such as Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), viewing them as cost-effective means of showcasing military prowess while supporting US global operations.

These forces train primarily for foreign interventions rather than territorial defence, under the dubious doctrine of pre-emptively eliminating threats before they reach Canada. Yet under customary international law, pre-emptive action is permissible only when an attack is imminent, calling into question the legality of prolonged campaigns to suppress local resistance abroad.

Despite claims of operational security, the government’s opacity around special operations alarms Canadians who expect transparency about national military activities. Such openness could enrich public debate and help prevent future debacles like the Somalia affair, which led to the dissolution of the highly respected Airborne Regiment.

A recent book by former US soldier Seth Harp, The Fort Bragg Cartel, offers a chilling warning relevant to Canada’s current environment. Harp documents how extreme secrecy within elite American units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six has bred corruption, impunity, and drug trafficking, turning them into de facto global assassins whose targets are often chosen based on faulty intelligence. The human toll, he writes, extends to the soldiers themselves, their families, and the societies they devastate.

The heavy secrecy surrounding Canada’s JTF2 and CSOR—especially when serving US interests—creates fertile ground for similar dysfunction, even if on a smaller scale. Future deployments must therefore confront the ethical and moral implications of clandestine warfare conducted in the shadows of foreign lands.

Official secrecy around Canada’s participation in US-led interventions has conveniently narrowed public expectations for transparency. It is troubling to consider that Canadian soldiers may be assisting efforts to suppress Indigenous resistance to foreign domination in the Global South.

On Remembrance Day, Canadians deserve to know the names of all their fallen soldiers, not a list cynically redacted for political purposes. A nation cannot truly honour the memory of its unknown dead.

Morgan Duchesney is a Canadian writer and Karate teacher whose work has appeared in Canadian Dimension, Humanist Perspectives, Adbusters, Briarpatch, Shintani Harmonizer, Victoria Standard, the Hampton Institute and the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to political writing, Morgan has published martial arts work and short fiction.