14 mars écrit par Pierre Jasmin, édité par la webmestre Valery Latulippe,

Cher Anton, 

Les Artistes pour la paix (les huit membres de notre conseil d’administration figurent en cc) vous remercient pour votre réponse rapide et positive, mais surtout pour toute l’énergie que vous déployez depuis des années afin de convaincre nos élus que le Canada sera plus en sécurité en adhérant au Traité sur l’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaires. La situation mondiale est en ce moment dangereuse et volatile : c’est pourquoi nous devons faire confiance à nos arbitres suprêmes, l’Organisation des Nations unies et son secrétaire général, Antonio Guterres, qui ont ensemble voté en juillet 2017 avec 122 pays pour la proposition d’Elayne Whyte Gomez, ambassadrice du Costa Rica, à la grande satisfaction de la Croix-Rouge internationale. 

Permettez-moi d’adresser ce courriel également à un grand ambassadeur de la paix, l’honorable Douglas Roche (qui m’a écrit hier) et à un nouveau venu sur notre scène politique, Mark Carney, à qui j’ai écrit cet après-midi. 

Nous attendons votre signal pour envoyer un appel commun pancanadien bilingue à l’effet que la paix est notre vœu le plus cher; elle l’a été pour moi dès 1995 et 2007 (voir deux photos avec deux maires d’Hiroshima, à Montréal et à Pugwash en Nouvelle-Écosse).

Avec l’expression de notre solidarité, 

Pierre
Secrétaire général 

Cher Pierre, 

La Coalition Hiroshima-Nagasaki Day apprécie grandement que vous nous ayez fait parvenir une copie de l’appel des  Artistes pour la Paix auprès de la mairesse de Montréal Valérie Plante et de Sébastien Côté, adjoint politique à la mairesse de Sherbrooke, afin d’obtenir l’appui des deux villes au Traité sur l’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaires – ONU.

Je vous remercie d’avoir inclus dans votre appel le texte de l’article d’opinion de Setsuko Thurlow dans le Hill Times d’Ottawa intitulé « Cher Premier ministre » et mon article d’opinion dans le même journal intitulé « Le Canada et les armes nucléaires », avec l’article « L’héritage atomique du Canada ». Ces articles sont désormais affichés sur le site web de HNDC https://hiroshimadaycoalition.ca/ , ainsi que l’article de Setsuko dans le Toronto Star, « J’ai survécu à l’attaque de la bombe atomique sur Hiroshima. Le Canada n’a toujours pas retenu la leçon de ce jour-là ». J’ai joint le tout sous forme de fichiers distincts à titre de références.

Pour votre information, Setsuko et plusieurs autres directeurs du HNDC s’entretiendront avec Rory Ditchburn du bureau de la mairesse Olivia Chow le 20 mars prochain sur la façon dont la ville de Toronto peut  

  • s’impliquer plus activement dans le mouvement d’abolition des armes nucléaires,  
  • se souvenir aussi du symbolisme et de l’héritage du jardin de la paix de l’hôtel de ville depuis 1984 et  
  • organiser une autre audition publique par le conseil de santé de la ville de Toronto, concernant les dangers croissants de l’utilisation réelle d’armes nucléaires et leurs effets potentiels sur la ville de Toronto. 

Le maire John Tory et le Conseil municipal de Toronto avaient rendu hommage à Setsuko Thurlow pour son militantisme en faveur de la paix et de l’abolition des armes nucléaires en 2017. L’année suivante, la Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition a organisé des présentations par des organisations de paix, de justice sociale et des organisations communautaires au Toronto Board of Health. Ces présentations sont toujours accessibles sur le site web de la HNDC https://hiroshimadaycoalition.ca/city#top. 

À la suite de ces soumissions, le Conseil de santé de Toronto a voté à l’unanimité le 16 avril 2018 pour recommander au Conseil municipal de « demander au gouvernement du Canada de signer le Traité des Nations unies sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires » et d’ « Exprimer son soutien à la réaffirmation par la ville de Toronto de sa position en tant que zone exempte d’armes nucléaires.  » Le conseil municipal a adopté la motion demandant au gouvernement du Canada de signer le Traité sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires le 24 avril. Le 11 mai 2018, Julie Lavertu, administratrice du greffe municipal, a envoyé le texte des motions du conseil municipal et du conseil de santé au Premier ministre Justin Trudeau, à la ministre des Affaires étrangères, Chrystia Freeland et à la ministre de la Santé, Ginette Petitpas Taylor. 

Les Artistes Pour la Paix ont donc raison de suggérer aux Villes de Montréal et de Sherbrooke qu’elles ont, elles aussi, un rôle civique important à jouer dans l’examen des dangers actuels très réels des armes nucléaires pour les villes et leurs grandes populations au Canada.

Meilleures salutations,

Anton Wagner

 

Photos par les APLP inclues dans la correspondance :   



 

Le 12 mars, Pierre Jasmin avait écrit : 

Madame la mairesse de Montréal, 

monsieur Sébastien Côté (adjoint à la mairesse de Sherbrooke), 

le dernier message https://www.artistespourlapaix.org/artistes-pour-la-paix-de-lannee-trois-realisatrices-de-cinema/ des Artistes pour la Paix se termine cette semaine par un appel semblable à celui de nos amiEs de l’International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. 

Nous vous rappelons notre slogan : nous sommes désarmantEs! Mais comme Claude Saint-Jarre, nous sommes persistants. L’appel est le suivant : « Merci aux artistes qui auront le courage de se joindre à nous et à notre appui vital au Traité sur l’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaires (ONU 2021), un traité de paix défié par la Russie et huit autres impuissances nucléaires, dont Israël et les États-Unis. »  

Nous vous saurions gré de l’écouter avec votre entière attention (cinq minutes de votre temps pour prendre connaissance de notre préoccupation principale). 

Pierre Jasmin 

Secrétaire général 

 

Nous vous recopions aussi le message de nos amis Setsuko Thurlow et Anton Wagner de Toronto : 

https://hiroshimadaycoalition.ca/  

 

Dear prime minister, please address the nuclear threat to life on Earth: from a Hiroshima survivor 

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau, 

As you prepare to leave office, allow me to appeal to you to address the defining crisis of human history: the nuclear threat to life on Earth. I last made this public appeal to you in 2020 to which you did not reply. But with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now set at 89 seconds to midnight, closer than ever, I owe it to the great cause to which I have dedicated my life – nuclear disarmament – to try again. 

I am a survivor of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, a crime against humanity made possible in part by Canada’s crucial contributions to the Manhattan Project. What I saw, through a terrified and bereaved child’s eyes, was nothing less than the beginning of the end of the world. I have told the story of my miraculous escape from Hell countless times because I have never lost hope in the capacity of humanity to save itself from the worst of its inventions.   

In recent years, I played my part in a diplomatic breakthrough potentially signaling the end of the nuclear nightmare: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states, two-thirds of the United Nations, in 2017. Yet your Government chose to stand on the wrong side of history, following the directives of both the Obama and Trump Administrations for NATO states to refuse to participate in the TPNW talks in    New York: the first time Canada has boycotted negotiations mandated by the UN General Assembly.   

I was honored to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a network of activists and survivors inspired by the success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in the 1990s, a decade when Canada was admired as a champion of humanitarian disarmament, not least for its urging of major reforms to NATO’s nuclear policies. 

The Foreign Minister from that inspiring time was Lloyd Axworthy, who has publicly appealed to you to sign the TPNW, as have former Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and the late John Turner, former Liberal Foreign Ministers Bill Graham and John Manley, and a Who’s Who list of former senior diplomats and ambassadors, as well as 74% of Canadians in a 2021 poll.  

This is the Treaty that you described as “sort of useless” because it was not supported by the nuclear-weapon states and their junior military partners. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has already established a powerful new anti-nuclear norm and stigma, complementing and supplementing the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty Canada has always supported. But how much more ‘sort of useful’ would the TPNW be if it found friends like Canada, finally willing to break the shackles of nuclear dependency? 

Because of its path breaking provisions on victim assistance and environmental remediation, the TPNW also offers Canada a way to belatedly make amends for its role in the atomic age: the mining of uranium on colonized Dene territory that paved the atomic highway to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Canada’s involvement and complicity in the agonizing epochs of nuclear testing, nuclear arms racing, and nuclear proliferation that followed. 

In August 1998, members of the Dene community of Deline in the Northwest Territories travelled to Hiroshima to apologize for their unwitting part in the atomic atrocities. Is it not high time that the Canadian Government issued such an apology, both to the survivors of the bombings and to the affected Dene? Such an apology, however, must be matched by action: and signing the TPNW should be top of the list. 

I have lived in Canada for 70 of the 80 years of the atomic age, as tides of concern over nuclear weapons have ebbed and flowed. When your father was Prime Minister, he sought to ‘suffocate’ the arms race and bring the reign of nuclear terror to an end. I believe he would be dismayed at Canada’s loss of leadership on disarmament, but encouraged by the path to Global Zero opened by the TPNW.  

Prime Minister, I dearly wish I had the chance to discuss Canada’s participation in the world-wide nuclear weapons abolition movement with you five years ago, or before. I recently celebrated my 93rd birthday and am still recovering from a serious fall. But I am neither ready nor able to give up. And while you remain Prime Minister, every second still counts.  

Sincerely, 

Setsuko Thurlow 

 

 

CM, MSW 

Toronto 

A founder of the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition https://hiroshimadaycoalition.ca/ in Toronto, Setsuko Thurlow jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in 2017. 

Auparavant, Anton Wagner avait écrit ceci en début d’année : 

 The Ottawa Hill Times has published my op-ed “Canada’s Atomic Legacy” online while Parliament is adjourned at Canada’s atomic legacy – The Hill Times 

The Hill Times has a paywall so I have copied the text of the op-ed below. 

Best wishes for 2025, Anton 

Canada’s atomic legacy 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would do well to listen to appeals that world leaders act to abolish nuclear weapons to save humanity. 

 

Opinion | BY ANTON WAGNER | January 2, 2025 

Canada’s atomic legacy 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would do well to listen to appeals that world leaders act to abolish nuclear weapons to save humanity. 

The appeal to the world by this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, that nuclear weapons cannot coexist with humanity is a call for Canadians to remember our own country’s nuclear legacy.  

Canadians have forgotten the pivotal role Canada played in the development of atom bombs that now threaten the very existence of human civilization. 

During the height of the Second World War in 1942, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed to provide the British and Americans with Canadian uranium to develop an atom bomb. A secret Order in Council allocated $89-million in 2024 dollars to take control of Eldorado Gold Mine’s uranium mine in the Northwest Territories and uranium refinery in Port Hope, Ontario.  

When Mackenzie King hosted the first Quebec Conference with then-United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt and United Kingdom prime minister Winston Churchill in Quebec City the following year, the two leaders invited Mackenzie King to integrate atomic research in Canada and our uranium supply with the Manhattan Project established by the Americans to manufacture atom bombs. In 1944, Mackenzie King’s Cabinet War Committee approved an expenditure of up to $126-million in 2024 dollars for the construction and operating costs of a heavy water nuclear reactor as a joint American-British-Canadian project. 

Mackenzie King recorded his conviction that “the atomic bomb has changed everything” in his diary. He knew that if Russia were to attack the United States, Soviet planes would have to cross Canadian territory. “This country would be the battlefield and everything we value here would be obliterated,” he wrote. Canada would be forced to seek protection under the American nuclear umbrella. 

Mackenzie King considered advocating giving the secret of the new weapons to Russia two months after the Americans dropped a uranium atom bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki in August 1945. He was intrigued by the suggestion that the sharing of scientific knowledge regarding the atomic bomb by all scientists might prove sufficient to prevent any one country taking advantage of the immense destructive power of the new weapon. 

At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, Mackenzie King asked Churchill how the United Kingdom and the U.S. could prevent Russia from capturing Western Europe with its much larger conventional armed forces. Churchill informed him that the Americans would threaten to attack Moscow and other Russian cities and destroy them with atom bombs from the air. This came as a revelation to Mackenzie King who had not known that such planning was already in existence for an atomic war against Russia. “From Churchill’s words,” he recorded in his diary, “it would seem as if his inside information was to the effect that America was expecting that she might have to act in a short time and has made her plans accordingly.” 

Canada did seek shelter under the American nuclear umbrella. It became a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, and has always supported NATO’s nuclear weapons first-strike policy. We sold 250 kilograms of plutonium created by our NRX nuclear reactor at Chalk River to the Americans for the production of nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1976. The U.S. and Britain manufactured 20,000 nuclear bombs made principally with Canadian uranium by 1965. Canada supplied India with the CIRUS nuclear research reactor, based on Canada’s NRX reactor. It produced the plutonium for India’s first nuclear test, “Smiling Buddha,” in 1974. 

Lost in this long history of Canada’s involvement with the production of nuclear weapons is Mackenzie King’s awareness that the atom bomb could end it all. Eleven days after the Americans staged the first atomic test explosion in New Mexico in July of 1945, he wrote in his diary: “I feel that we are approaching a moment of terror to mankind, for it means that, under the stress of war, men have at last not only found but created the Frankenstein which conceivably could destroy the human race.”  

On Dec. 10, the House of Commons resolved unanimously that the House encourage the government to take concrete steps to honor Nihon Hidankyo for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that the House affirm that nuclear disarmament is a crucial step towards ensuring global peace and security. The unanimous motion also called on the government to engage with the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and to engage with civil society to advance the cause of nuclear abolition. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would do well to listen to the House of Commons’ and Nihon Hidankyo’s appeal that world leaders act to abolish nuclear weapons to save humanity. 

Anton Wagner is one of the directors of the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition in Toronto. His Mackenzie King biography, The Spiritualist Prime Minister, was published in 2024 by White Crow Books in the U.K. in association with the Survival Research Institute of Canada.  

His photo exhibition, “Canada and the Atom Bomb,” opened inside Toronto City Hall in August and continues online on the Toronto Metropolitan University Image Arts website: https://hiroshima.imagearts.torontomu.ca/canada-and-the-atom-bomb/ 

The Hill Times