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Around 100 anti-war protesters gathered in front of the Château Laurier on March 4 demanding peace, an end to the war in Iran and government divestment from the defence industry.
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The protesters rallied outside the Conference of Defence Associations to voice opposition to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s significant increase in defence spending. Cabinet ministers, military leaders and defence industry representatives meet at the annual conference.
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“We believe that Canada should be investing in education, in youth, in housing, and not in wars that are started by Donald Trump and started by Americans,” Mariam Furré, a spokesperson for the Ottawa Peace Council, told the Ottawa Citizen.
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Carney’s government has ramped up defence spending to meet a NATO target of two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year.
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The federal government has committed to increasing defence spending to five per cent of GDP by 2035. To offset part of the increased funding to the Department of National Defence, Carney has promised to cut billions of dollars in spending across most other departments and agencies over three years.
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Part of that plan involves shedding around 30,000 jobs from the federal public service.
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“They have issued layoff notices for federal workers, and then they say that they are going to have a new defence industrial strategy to ramp up weapons production in the country, to ramp up arms exports … this is just not right and we are absolutely opposed to this,” said Tamara Lorincz, a spokesperson for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
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“We want to have a green, care economy, not a warfare economy.”
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Temperatures ran high that afternoon as counter protesters, who support regime change in Iran, gathered on the opposite side of a police line.
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They waved flags of the former Shah of Iran and echoed similar chants and signs from a rally on Feb. 28 in which hundreds of supporters of American-Israeli strikes on Iran gathered in front of the American Embassy to celebrate. The Shah of Iran was deposed in 1979 in the revolution that brought the current regime to power.
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Others waved Israeli and American flags.
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Counter protesters cited a brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in Iran in recent months as the reason they supported the strikes, which killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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“Our people have been killed, some of them have been killed and shot in the street, some of them arrived to the hospital and Islamic Republic thugs went after them and shot them in the hospital,” David Akhavan, a counter protester, told the Ottawa Citizen.