Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
This commitment required proactive peacemaking and education of peace and empathy. But it was used to serve the ever-growing military-industrial-financial-media-digital-academic complex. All are making profits, while millions of human beings in the world are dying of famine and disease.
On March 25, 2026, at some point in the morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney posted a public statement promoting the Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB)—a new multilateral institution he has spent months building, lobbying for, and positioning Canada to host.
“The Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank will provide low-cost financing for critical defence projects in participating countries,” he wrote. “By pooling credit strength, we’ll build our military capacity and create good jobs across our defence sectors.“
At some point the same day, Canada’s representative at the United Nations General Assembly raised the abstention card on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity in recorded history. One hundred and twenty-three nations voted in favour. Canada did not.
Same day. Same government. Same prime minister who stood at Davos in January and spoke about the end of living within the lie.
I want you to hold those two facts together, because they are not coincidental. They are the institutional expression of a single position that:
Canada's future is being built on weapons financing and NATO military expansion, and the moral vocabulary of human rights, accountability, and historical reckoning is available for speeches but not for votes, not for contracts, and not for the architecture of the state being constructed right now.
This piece documents that architecture. It is the companion to Canada in the Mirror, which asks what kind of country makes these choices and what in its history makes them legible. This piece asks what, specifically, Canada is building — and where it leads
On April 1, 2024, One Canadian Veteran, One Missile
Before the institutions, the human cost. Because the human cost is the point—and it is being buried under procurement language and diplomatic euphemism.
Jacob Flickinger was 40 years old. He was a Canadian citizen, a dual Canadian-American national, a military veteran, and a volunteer aid worker with World Central Kitchen. On April 1, 2024, he was travelling in a clearly marked aid convoy in Gaza when Israeli forces struck the vehicle with a precision-guided missile. He was killed along with six colleagues from Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Palestine. World Central Kitchen had coordinated the convoy’s route with the Israeli military in advance.
The missile used was the Spike LR2. It is manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, an Israeli state-owned arms company. It is also the precise type of munition that Canada’s Department of National Defence had announced, weeks earlier, it planned to purchase.
After Jacob Flickinger was killed by a Spike LR2, the Department of National Defence told The Maple it was “deeply concerned” by Israel’s attack on the aid workers. It said it had no plans to review the purchase.
Jacob Flickinger was killed by the missile his own government was buying. There is no diplomatic formulation that makes that sentence less than what it is.
He is in this article because his name belongs here. Because the arms trail is not an abstraction of permit numbers and dollar figures. It is a 40-year-old Canadian in a clearly marked van, on a coordinated route, in a territory his government’s exported components helped to destroy. The institutions come after. Jacob Flickinger comes first.
The Arms Trail
On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law mandating the death penalty by hanging for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis. The law applies exclusively to Palestinians. It requires execution within 90 days of sentencing, bars pardon or clemency, and allows no appeal.
B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, noted that the conviction rate for Palestinians in Israeli military courts is approximately 96 percent, and that in many cases these convictions are based on confessions obtained under torture and interrogation. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wore a small metal noose on his lapel in the Knesset chamber during the vote. He celebrated with champagne after the result.
+972 Magazine reported on Ammar, a 42-year-old Palestinian father of two from Al-Aroub refugee camp, who was first arrested at age 14 for allegedly throwing stones. He has been detained seven times. His most recent arrest involved 50 days of solitary confinement in a cold, windowless cell. Since his release, soldiers have raided his home twice. Under the new law, the next arrest could be his last. “They already shoot us for no reason,” he said. “Now they have a death penalty.”
The European Union called the law “a grave regression.” Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom urged Israeli lawmakers to abandon it before the vote, expressing “deep concern” about its discriminatory character. The UN Human Rights Office called on Israel to “immediately repeal” the law, noting it violates international law’s prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and further entrenches Israel’s violation of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid.
Canada expressed concerns by doing nothing.
This is the government whose arms exports Canada’s own export law obligates the Minister of Foreign Affairs to block when there is a substantial risk they could be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The law that the Israeli Knesset passed four days ago, the 96 percent conviction rate in military courts where confessions are obtained under torture, and the administrative detention without trial of roughly half of the 9,500 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons—these are the conditions under which the weapons Canada ships are being deployed. The Arms Trade Treaty Canada has signed does not permit indifference to what the arms are used for. The government’s silence is not neutrality. It is a choice.
Before October 7, 2023, Canadian companies were already selling Israel $26 million in military goods annually—a tenfold increase over the previous decade. In 2023, they sold a record $30.6 million, making Israel the highest non-United States destination for Canadian military export permits that year. In December 2023, an assistant deputy minister told a standing committee in Parliament that no new permits had been authorized since October 7. This was false.
The Maple obtained export data showing $28.5 million in new permits had been authorized in the first two months of the war—one processed within four days of application, one authorized on the same day the assistant deputy minister made his statement. Caught, the government did not stop. It changed its language. No longer “no new permits”—now there are no new permits for goods “that could be used in the current conflict in Gaza.” A legal distinction it invented, without basis in Canadian export law.
Under this formulation, $18.9 million in military goods were shipped directly to Israel in 2024. In February 2026, the Carney government authorized $37.2 million in new Iron Dome-related permits.
A Crown corporation — the Canadian Commercial Corporation — signed a contract on September 26, 2024, to supply the United States with up to $78.8 million in artillery propellants manufactured by General Dynamics, some routed to Israel. This contract was signed two weeks after Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly publicly stated she was intervening to stop a related sale. There is no evidence it has been cancelled.
At a Liberal Party election rally in Calgary in April 2025, a protester told Carney a genocide was happening in Gaza. Carney replied, “I’m aware. That’s why we have an arms embargo.” He then retracted his apparent recognition of the word “genocide,”saying he “didn’t hear that word.”
The Arms Trade Treaty, to which Canada is a signatory, requires the Minister of Foreign Affairs to refuse export permits when there is a substantial risk that goods could be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The International Court of Justice found it plausible in January 2024 that Israel’s conduct in Gaza could constitute genocide, and ordered provisional measures. One hundred and seventy-three former Canadian diplomats have called for a full arms embargo. UN experts have demanded the same. The government’s response has been to change its language while continuing to ship.
Bryan Palmer’s first volume documents that Canada’s economic history has been repeatedly entangled with the violence of others—supplying it, feeding it, and then describing itself as standing apart. The arms trail is not a departure from Canadian values. It is a continuation of a pattern that predates the Charter by three centuries.
March 25, 2026: Creating the Bank of War, Abstaining on Slavery
The Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank is not a proposal. It is under construction. Its charter negotiations concluded in Montréal on March 26, 2026 — three days ago — with representatives from 18 countries at the table. Canada’s lead negotiator was the CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada.
The bank describes itself on its own website as a multilateral institution designed to deliver “long-term, low-cost financing” for weapons procurement, “smarter, faster” acquisition of military hardware, and the unlocking of private capital for “defence and security firms across the supply “chain”—including, in its own language, drones, munitions, and cyberinfrastructure.
It is, in short, a financial engine purpose-built to reduce the cost of arming NATO member states and their allies.
Carney’s involvement is not peripheral. In November 2025, the DSRB’s development group president testified before Parliament praising Carney’s understanding of multilateral banking structures.
Canada began lobbying to host the headquarters. Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal, and Ottawa all launched competitive bids.
All of Canada’s Big Six banks— RBC, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD, BMO, and National Bank — formally backed the initiative.
On February 2, 2026, Canada’s Ministers of Finance and National Defence held a defence financing roundtable with those same institutions and publicly endorsed the DSRB. Carney directly lobbied UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the bank as part of bilateral security partnership discussions.
The Big Six banks are not incidental to this story. Bryan Palmer’s second volume, Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960, documents how the same financial institutions that consolidated Canada’s industrial economy in the early twentieth century were built on capital extracted through colonial systems—including, as his first volume records, the Atlantic slave economy that Scotiabank and CIBC were originally capitalized to serve. Those same institutions are now the anchor backers of a multilateral bank designed to finance drones and munitions. The ledger Palmer documents has not been closed. It has been refinanced.
On March 25, 2026, while Canada abstained on the resolution condemning the gravest crime against humanity, Carney was publicly promoting the DSRB.
Same day. Same government. Same institutional logic that Palmer’s two volumes trace from the first slave sale in New France to the founding charter being written in Montréal.
Carney said at Davos that Canada is “no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.”
The DSRB is the institutional form of the strength expressed as capital. Not values expressed as policy. Weapons procurement financed at scale, with sovereign guarantees, through the same banks whose founding capital was extracted from the bodies of enslaved people.
The sign was never removed from the window. It has been incorporated into the bank’s founding charter.
The Technology Coming Home
There is a further question the DSRB raises — one that Canadians are not being asked to consider.
The bank explicitly finances what its own documents call "AI and other technologies with both civilian and military uses."
That phrase — dual-use — carries a specific technical meaning. A surveillance and targeting platform built to identify and track individuals in a war zone operates on the same architectural principles as one built to identify and track individuals at a protest, at a border crossing, or in an immigrant community.
The application changes. The system does not.
Palantir Technologies is the dominant AI and data analytics provider in NATO military operations.
In January 2024, it entered a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence, with its tools used during Israeli military operations in Gaza and in the September 2024 Lebanon attacks. In the occupied West Bank, Palantir functions as the integration layer for Israel’s surveillance architecture, fusing mobile forensics, signals intelligence intercepts, and facial recognition into the systems used to monitor and control the Palestinian civilian population. Gaza has functioned as a live laboratory for these AI warfare technologies — what is developed and tested there is marketed globally as battle-tested.
In December 2025, the UK Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir a £240 million contract for data analytics capabilities enabling strategic, tactical, and live decision-making across defence operations, including interoperability with NATO systems.
In April 2025, Palantir secured a $30 million contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop a system designed to streamline deportation through predictive algorithms providing near-real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements.
This is not a company operating at a distance from Canada.
In January 2024, Palantir Technologies Canada established a partnership making its platforms available across all Canadian government departments, agencies, and Crown Corporations through the federal government’s Software Licensing Supply Arrangement — the primary procurement vehicle for enterprise software across the entire federal government.
The Department of National Defence held a $14 million Palantir contract. The Ontario Provincial Police holds a $36.6 million Palantir contract. Canada’s public pension funds — the Public Sector Pension Investment Board and the Canadian Pension Plan — are major Palantir shareholders. When asked directly, CSIS, CSE, and the RCMP will neither confirm nor deny whether they use Palantir software.
The DSRB’s charter has not yet been published. No named contract between the bank and any specific technology company exists yet in the public record.
But the question the DSRB’s own scope document requires us to ask is this:
When a multilateral bank capitalized by NATO governments finances dual-use AI and cyberinfrastructure at scale—with Palantir already embedded in the procurement frameworks of those same governments, already tested in the occupation of Gaza, and already deployed against immigrants and civilian populations domestically—who guarantees that the technology financed by public money, including Canadian pension money, stays on the battlefield and out of the street?
The Charter’s Section 8 protects Canadians against unreasonable search and seizure. Section 2(b) protects freedom of expression.
These protections were written for a world of paper warrants and human informants. The architecture being built now — AI targeting systems tested in Gaza, scaled through NATO procurement, financed by a multilateral bank whose charter was written in Montréal — operates at a speed and a scale those sections were never designed to address.
Carney said at Davos that Canada would build institutions that function as described. The DSRB functions exactly as described. That is precisely the problem.
The Digital Slavery as a Reality
There is a word for what this architecture produces when it is turned on civilians. It has not yet found its way into the policy language surrounding the DSRB. But the cases that document it are already on the public record.
In July 2025, after the UK government proscribed Palestine Action, two pro-Palestine organizations had their bank accounts frozen without formal charges, without warning, and without a stated reason. Greater Manchester Friends for Palestine—a group that organizes peaceful protests and vigils, and that sends humanitarian aid to Gaza—was told by Greater Manchester Police that its account had been frozen as part of an investigation into Palestine Action, a separate organization. The funds it used to support people starving in Gaza became inaccessible. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, operating for 25 years, lost access to its account because its website had briefly carried a donation link to Palestine Action before the proscription—a link it removed immediately after the ban. The account was not restored.
In Germany, the pattern is broader and more documented. Left-wing parties, aid organizations, publishers, and critical journalists are losing their bank accounts without having broken any laws, without formal banning, and without being given reasons on the grounds of “business secrecy.”
The German Communist Party’s accounts were terminated. A freelance journalist covering government institutions had his account closed. A legal aid organization funding court proceedings for antifascists lost access to funds after the Trump administration designated the broader structure it supported as a foreign terrorist organization.
Nine ICC officials, including six judges investigating crimes in Gaza, were sanctioned by the United States and lost access to their bank accounts, credit cards, and PayPal accounts. Germany has been downgraded by the CIVICUS Monitor from its highest democratic freedom rating to “restricted” in two years—placing it on a par with Hungary.
Palestinians have faced this architecture for longer than anyone. UN experts documented a liquidity crisis in Gaza produced by Israel blocking currency inflows and threatening to cut Palestinian banks off from the global financial system entirely. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora had accounts frozen by Wise and Payoneer without explanation, cutting off funds needed for food, medical treatment, and escape. The system was not targeting combatants. It was targeting economic personhood.
What these cases demonstrate is a mechanism that is already operational: an administrative designation—not a charge, not a conviction, not a court order—triggers financial platform compliance algorithms that freeze or terminate accounts. The target loses access to funds. Without funds, they cannot pay bills, collect donations, sustain operations, or function in civil society. This is civic death by click. Not imprisonment. Not physical punishment. The administrative erasure of economic existence. And it happens without due process, without transparency, and increasingly without any effective legal remedy.
The connection to the DSRB is not speculative. The bank explicitly finances dual-use AI — the same category of technology that makes automated financial compliance systems possible at scale. The architecture that identifies and tracks an individual in a war zone and the architecture that flags and freezes a bank account on the basis of a political designation run on the same logic.
Gaza, as researchers have documented, has been the live laboratory where these identification and targeting systems were developed and proven in conditions of total surveillance—an entire civilian population monitored, categorized, and controlled through interlocking data systems. They are now marketed to NATO governments as battle-tested.
The DSRB is the financing mechanism that will scale them.
The CCLA’s director of privacy, surveillance, and technology has warned that national digital identity systems could offer governments and companies a way to track every interaction on the internet — and that Canada has not developed an ecosystem able to preserve privacy.
Wikipedia Canada signed a digital cooperation agreement with the EU in December 2025, committing to align approaches on digital identity. The EU’s digital identity wallet rolls out by the end of 2026. Canada’s cybersecurity Bill C-8 contains warrantless data access mechanisms and a secrecy-by-default approach that the CCLA warns can be used to surveil Canadians in secret, well beyond its stated purpose. Committee to Protect Journalists
These are not future risks. They are the present legislative landscape within which the DSRB is being built.
Digital identity is the master key to the architecture. When your verified online presence is linked to your financial access, your government services, and your freedom of movement—and when AI systems can flag that identity simultaneously across financial, governmental, and communications platforms—the debanking of a Palestinian aid worker in Manchester, the account termination of a German party, and the freezing of ICC judges' credit cards are not separate incidents. They are demonstrations of a system being scaled.
The connection to slavery that Canada refused to condemn on March 25 is not rhetorical. Slavery operated through the control of bodies and the systematic denial of economic personhood—the enslaved person could not own property, enter contracts, or participate in economic life. The architecture being built now operates through the control of digital identity and the systematic denial of financial access. The mechanism has changed. The function has not.
On the day Carney promoted the Bank of War, Canada abstained on a resolution condemning the gravest crime against humanity. Those two facts, on the same day, in the same government, are not coincidental.
They are the institutional expression of a single historical position—one that Bryan Palmer has spent two volumes beginning to document, and one that the citizens of this country have the legal tools, and the moral obligation to name clearly and refuse.
What Accountability Looks Like
Canada is a signatory to the Arms Trade Treaty. It has obligations under the UN Charter, the Rome Statute, and the Genocide Convention. The ICJ has issued provisional measures. One hundred and seventy-three former Canadian diplomats have called for a full arms embargo on Israel. The CCLA has documented Bill C-9’s threat to Charter-protected expression.
The DSRB’s own language confirms it will finance dual-use AI and surveillance infrastructure.And Palantir — the company whose tools have been used to target civilians in Gaza and to build a deportation algorithm in the United States — is already embedded in the procurement framework of the Canadian federal government.
These are not predictions. They are the present state of the public record.
Accountability means demanding, specifically:
- A full arms embargo on Israel under the Arms Trade Treaty obligations Canada has already accepted.
- Withdrawal from military operations assisting a war prosecuted in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.
- Transparent parliamentary oversight of every DSRB charter provision before any Canadian public institution commits to it.
- A full public accounting of Palantir’s contracts across Canadian federal and provincial governments.
- The withdrawal of Bill C-9 for substantive revision.
- A vote, next time the UN General Assembly asks, in favour of condemning the gravest crime against humanity.
- It would protect the press freedom guaranteed under Section 2(b) of the Charter—which means responding when Shurat HaDin, an Israeli lawfare organization whose founder has publicly described a collaborative operational relationship with the Mossad, sends demand letters to payment processors and to Ontario law enforcement calling for a criminal investigation and the shutdown of The Maple, a Canadian independent news outlet, for publishing journalism about Canadians who served in the Israeli military. The RCMP investigated, found the site non-criminal, and closed the file. The Canadian government said nothing.
These are not aspirations. They are obligations. The difference between aspiration and obligation is enforcement. That enforcement is the work of citizens who understand what is being built in their name and refuse to let it proceed without their knowledge.
"Si Vis Pacem, Cole Justitiam"
Alfred de Zayas, writing from fifty years of engagement with international law, named the ILO’s foundational motto against the doctrine that now drives the DSRB: “si vis pacem, para bellum”—if you want peace, prepare for war—as opposed to“si vis pacem, cole justitiam”—if you want peace, cultivate justice.
Carney is building a bank on the first principle while claiming the second.
De Zayas’s assessment of the inaction of states is worth holding:
“One is tempted to think that international law no longer exists, that barbarism and the law of the jungle have taken over. But no, we must all persevere and reaffirm human values and the importance of international law.“
His word for the alternative to accountability is precise: complicity. Qui tacet consentire videtur. Silence implies consent.
Canada’s voting record at the United Nations, examined resolution by resolution as de Zayas examines it, is itself the answer to Carney’s Davos performance.
On the right to peace: abstained. On unilateral coercive measures: voted against. On the Cuba embargo: voted against or abstained. On the sequels of colonialism: abstained. On the gravest crime against humanity: abstained.
The consistency test Carney invoked—applying the same standards to allies and rivals — is the one that Canada’s own voting record fails most systematically, year after year, administration after administration. This is not Carney’s failure alone. It is the pattern. But Carney promised at Davos to end the pattern. The record says he has deepened it!
Jacob Flickinger was killed by the missile his own government was buying. The bank designed to finance the next generation of that procurement had its charter negotiated in Montréal last week. The technology tested on the population of Gaza is already running inside Canadian government systems. And on the day all of this was being promoted, Canada abstained on a resolution condemning slavery.
This is not the story of a government that failed to live up to its values.
It is the story of a government whose values,as Bryan Palmer has spent two volumes beginning to document, were always the performance—and whose conduct was always the reality.
The question is whether we are willing to see it clearly enough to change it!
