Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney rushed to declare Canada’s full-throated support for the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran, in a statement issued just hours after the first wave of missiles and bombs rained down on the country Saturday morning.

Speaking for the Canadian ruling elite as a whole, Carney justified this unprovoked, illegal war of aggression that is aimed at imposing regime-change on Iran and asserting unchallenged US hegemony over the world’s most important energy-exporting region.

Some 72 hours after its launch, the joint US-Israeli assault has included strikes on more than 2,000 targets across Iran, the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s head of state, and dozens of other leading government and military officials, and the slaughter of over 500 civilians.

Repeating would-be dictator Donald Trump’s lying war propaganda, Carney declared from India, “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from threatening international peace and security. Canada’s position remains clear: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East, has one of the world’s worst human rights records, and must never be allowed to obtain or develop nuclear weapons.”

In an official statement issued almost simultaneously, Carney deplored that “despite diplomatic efforts, Iran has neither fully dismantled its nuclear program, halted all enrichment activities, nor ended its support for regional terrorist proxy groups.” Carney also asserted that “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The truth of the matter is that Iran has always insisted that its nuclear activities are for civilian use only. No evidence has ever been produced to support the claim that Tehran is seeking to build nuclear weapons, as the western-dominated International Atomic Energy Agency has itself repeatedly stated.

Moreover, it was Trump who in 2018 torpedoed the UN-backed Iran nuclear accord and unilaterally imposed massive, globally-enforced economic sanctions on Iran with the stated aimed of crashing its economy and precipitating regime change.

For decades Iran has been the target of aggression by the US, Israel and their NATO allies— including war threats and Iran’s encirclement by a massive complex of military bases, cyber-warfare and assassinations of nuclear scientists, punishing economic sanctions, and imperialist regime-change wars in neighbouring states (Iraq and Afghanistan)—making a mockery of Carney’s assertion that it is the main aggressor in the region.

Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime has attempted to counter imperialist pressure and defend its regional ambitions by developing alliances with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, while at the same time seeking an accommodation with imperialism.

The principal disturbers of “international peace and security” throughout the Middle East have been for decades American imperialism and its allies, including Canada. They have waged virtually uninterrupted war in the Middle East and Central Asia for over three-and-a-half decades.

As US and Israeli forces struck targets across the country, including a girls’ school in which reportedly 153 people were killed, Carney cynically asserted that “Canada stands with the Iranian people in their long and courageous struggle against Iran’s oppressive regime.” He emphasized Canada’s longstanding support for regime change in Iran, recalling that “Canada has listed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity, and has sanctioned 256 Iranian entities and 222 individuals” in recent years.

In offering its unreserved and enthusiastic support for the war against Iran, Carney’s statement went even further than the initial comments offered by other allies of US imperialism. Whereas the EU foreign policy chief hypocritically called for “maximum restraint,” and French President Emmanuel Macron decried the “ongoing escalation” and said it “must stop” —all in an effort to cast Iranian retaliation as “aggression” and offer their own support for the regime-change operation—Carney did not even attempt to conceal or soften Canada’s total support for the illegal US-Israeli war.

The Liberal government’s enthusiastic embrace of this war of aggression illustrates in stark terms the true nature of its conflict with the Trump administration and the call Carney issued at the World Economic Forum in Davos for an alliance of “middle powers” that could “act together” to navigate a world riven by great-power conflict. In the context of Trump’s threat to annex Canada and his “America first” trade war policies, Carney acknowledged that the “rules-based international order” under US hegemony was at an end and had, in fact, always been a fraud. But when the interests of Canadian imperialism align with those of the US hegemon, as they do in the imperialist drive to reorganize the Middle East, Canada will not hesitate to support any crime.

Canada supports the imperialist drive for a “New Middle East”

The ongoing war against Iran is the most recent escalation of a wider regional war unleashed by US imperialism, alongside its Israeli proxy, to assert its unchallenged dominance of the Middle East and deny its chief geopolitical rival China access to the region’s immense energy resources and key trade routes. At every step, Canadian imperialism has lined up behind the US and offered its full political support.

Canada eagerly backed the illegal 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran launched last June, in which the US and Israeli launched a massive and unprovoked series of airstrikes that killed over 1000 Iranians—mostly civilians. The Carney government, parroting the same baseless claims that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon used to justify the ongoing war, welcomed the Trump administration’s military intervention and demanded that Tehran not retaliate.

Likewise, successive Liberal governments under Carney and his predecessor Justin Trudeau have offered their steadfast political support to Israel throughout its imperialist-backed genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. The Zionist regime has also enjoyed Ottawa’s unflinching support for the series of wars it has waged against what it terms “Iranian proxies” in neighbouring countries. US imperialism’s key regional military ally has pursued a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing and extermination against the Palestinians in Gaza, killing far more than the 75,000 officially acknowledged dead, and instituted a regime of brutal repression and illegal occupation in the West Bank, in an effort to wipe out any Palestinian resistance. It invaded Lebanon to wage a massive assault against Hezbollah, struck the Houthis in Yemen, and occupied even more territory in southern Syria as the Assad regime fell to US and Turkish proxy forces.

Throughout this imperialist rampage, in which the US and Israel have committed some of the gravest war crimes of the 21st century, Canada has consistently asserted Israel’s “right to defend itself,” i.e. to commit any act of aggression against its perceived enemies, no matter the horrific toll on the civilian population. Canada has funnelled millions of dollars of weaponry through the US to Israel since October 2023, despite its repeated claims to have stopped arms exports.

Working with provincial governments of every political stripe, it has systematically suppressed opposition to the genocide and the war at home. From Trudeau on down, government ministers denounced students and workers protesting Israel’s mass slaughter and Canada’s complicity in it as “antisemites” and gave a free hand to far-right Zionist organizations to intimidate activists.

It is highly likely that Canadian forces are directly involved in the present war. So-called exchange officers from the Canadian Armed Forces were based at the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain and would have been involved in operational planning, a former CAF senior officer told CBC. The Department of Defence has unconvincingly sought to assert that this was not the case.

A lesser imperialist power, Canada seeks its share of the profits from exploiting the natural resources and economic opportunities opened up by the fall of the Iranian regime and the broader reorganization of the Middle East under US leadership. As the US confronts China with trade war, a massive military build-up, and increasing violent outbursts of imperialist aggression, Canadian imperialism has desperately sought to prove its worth as a junior partner.

It is in an effort to obfuscate the fact that the current US-Israeli war on Iran is part of this wider drive to forge a “New Middle East” that Carney’s statement downplays Israel’s role in the assault. He made no reference to its key role in planning and executing military operations, referring only to “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Carney no doubt recognizes that there is massive popular opposition to Israel’s war crimes and its genocide in Gaza, which would render his attempt to cast this war as an effort to defend “human rights” and international peace absurd. Moreover, minimizing Israel’s role in the war against Iran helps conceal the ways that US imperialism’s garrison state will be rewarded in the imperialist carve-up of the Middle East, given carte blanche to intensify its attempts to impose a “final solution” to the Palestinian question and create a “Greater Israel” by ethnically cleansing the West Bank and Gaza.

Canadian imperialism seeks its “seat at the table”

The Carney government’s eager support of the US-Israeli war against Iran exposes Carney’s high-flown rhetoric in Davos about a coalition of “middle powers.” “Middle powers must act together,” he declared, “because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.” Hardly a month later, Canadian imperialism is making clear its intention to secure its “seat at the table” in the carve up of the Middle East with its endorsement of US imperialism’s war crimes.

Canada is a second-rank imperialist power which has historically pursued its economic and political interests on the world stage through alliances with a dominant imperialist partner–first as part of the British Empire and subsequently as a close ally of US imperialism. What Carney termed in Davos the “rupture” in international relations is the final breakdown of the post-war world order upon which the Canada-US alliance rested. In the new redivision of the world among the imperialists that is well underway, Canadian imperialism seeks to retain some form of collaboration with its erstwhile US ally, while at the same time asserting more forcefully its own predatory interests.

While pushing back against Trump’s threats to Canadian “sovereignty” and desperately seeking leverage against the US through diversified international trade and by expanding military-security ties with the European and Asian-Pacific imperialist powers, Canada’s capitalist elite hopes to secure its share of the spoils in the Middle East by lining up behind Washington’s war on Iran.

The Canadian political and media establishment has fully supported the campaign for regime change in Iran, enthusiastically promoting the pro-imperialist protest movement of Iranian emigres that has called for the fall of the Islamic Republic and the return of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the US-back Shah overthrown by the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Like Carney, the Official Opposition Conservative Party, under far-right ideologue Pierre Poilievre, rushed to enthusiastically endorse the US-Israeli war. Poilievre called Iran “the principal source of terror in the Middle East and around the world,” declaring that “Conservatives support a democratic, free and permanently-denuclearized Iran” and that “Conservatives support the United States, Israel, and our allies across the Gulf to defend their sovereignty and dismantle the clerical military dictatorship of Iran.”

The two major pro-Quebec independence parties have also made clear they support the predatory objectives of the US-Israeli war and that international law is for them a matter of expediency, to be invoked only when it is in one’s self-interest.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the Parti Québécois, the principal separatist party, shared a tweet from one of the PQ members of the Quebec National Assembly revelling in the assassination of Khamenei. This underscores what the Quebec separatists mean when they pledge that an independent Quebec would be aligned with US “strategic interests.”

Yves-François Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc Québécois, the PQ’s sister party in the federal parliament denounced the Iranian “regime” in Carney and Trump-type terms as a “persistent threat ... to the security of the region” and declared his full support for the Israeli aggressor’s “right to ensure the security of its people.” However, he expressed “concern” that the Trump administration had launched the war without support from the US Congress or the European and Canadian imperialist powers. As a result, continued Blanchet, a BQ endorsement of the US-Israeli war on Iran would be “premature.”

The New Democratic Party (NDP) was the only major party to issue a statement opposing the war. Canada’s social democrats “strongly” condemned the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and deplored the Carney government’s decision to support it. The statement asserted that “we want Canada to be a voice for diplomacy, peace, and international law.” Interim NDP leader Don Davies lamented the fact that the war on Iran “contradicts numerous values PM Carney claimed he supported in Davos.”

Nobody should take this position for good coin. The NDP has propped up the Liberal government in parliament since 2019 and continued to do so while it plays a major role in US/NATO-instigated war on Russia, supports the Gaza genocide, and massively expands military spending. The NDP has systematically suppressed anti-war and anti-genocide voices in its own ranks, and been prominent in the campaign to stoke anti-Chinese sentiment as part of the imperialist powers’ preparations for war with Beijing.

Workers and young people in Canada must unequivocally oppose the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the Carney government’s complicity in this naked act of imperialist aggression against a historically oppressed country of 93 million people. This war threatens to plunge the Middle East into a devastating conflict with catastrophic consequences for civilians across the region and has the potential to trigger a global conflagration. The Canadian ruling elite is planning to ruthlessly pursue its imperialist interests in the ongoing redivision of the world, slashing spending on public services to pay for a massive military build-up and clamping down on any domestic opposition to its complicity in the horrific war crimes unleashed by US imperialism and its allies.

Imperialist war cannot be stopped by moral appeals to the capitalist political establishment, to uphold “peace” and “international law.” Only a politically independent movement of the international working class, leveraging its social power as the source of all productive labour, is powerful enough to halt imperialist war that threatens humanity with destruction.