A campaign poster for Canadian activist and author Yves Engler during his bid for the leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party (NDP). The poster expresses an anti-imperialist stance with the slogan "Hands off Venezuela". Photo: yvesengler.com.
By Yves Engler – Nov 13, 2025
NDP MPs and party leadership candidates are more cautious than Paris and London in challenging Trump’s war on Venezuela. Even the admiral in charge of the US violence appears more willing to buck the Donald.
On Tuesday the largest aircraft carrier in the world, USS Gerald Ford, arrived in the Caribbean as part of Trump’s bid to overthrow Venezuela’s government. The US has also sent other naval vessels, B-1 bombers and thousands of troops to intimidate, including special forces flying helicopter patrols from the warships along the Venezuelan coast. Trump has also empowered the CIA to conduct sabotage operations inside the country and during the past two months the US has blown up at least 20 boats, killing about 70 Venezuelans, Colombians and Trinidadians.
The UK and France have distanced themselves from US criminality. On Tuesday CNN reported, “The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal.”
UK has ceased sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean because it believes the US bombing campaign against vessels in the region is illegal and doesn’t want to be complicit.” For his part, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot labelled the US attacks illegal. “We have observed with concern the military operations in the Caribbean region, because they violate international law,” Barrot said on Tuesday.
The US military commander overseeing US Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsely, reportedly raised concerns about the bombing campaign. In a highly unusual step for a career military officer, Holsely is stepping down from his posta year into his command.
Canada is assisting in several ways. A Project Ploughshares report showed that Canadian-made camera systems have been used in the US strikes on Venezuelan boats. Additionally, Canadian naval vessels are engaged in counter narcotics patrols with their US counterparts in the Caribbean and Canada’s small base in Kingston, Jamaica, has long assisted US forces in the region. The Canadian military has also likely assisted the US strikes through NORAD, which has long had a ‘war on drugs’ mandate.
Ottawa doesn’t appear to have commented directly on the illegal US strikes. In fact, Anita Anand recently responded to a question about the illegality of US strikes by saying it’s “up to the U.S. to decide if it violated international law with Caribbean boat strikes”, reported Hill Times.
Canada also congratulated the Nobel Committee for recently awarding their peace prize to Venezuelan coup monger Maria Corina Machado (At a recent Miami business forum Machado said she would privatize $1.7 trillion in Venezuelan assets if the US installed her as leader of the country). Machado has been working with Canadian imperialism for two decades.
Since the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez Ottawa has supported efforts to oust the Venezuelan government. Between 2017 and 2020 the Liberals pursued an unprecedented campaign to oust Venezuela’s government. Ottawa adopted illegal sanctions, supported opposition groups, built an anti-Venezuela regional coalition, pressured Caribbean countries to join their campaign and took a complaint about the Venezuelan government to the International Criminal Court. It then recognized a little-known opposition politician — who never garnered even 100,000 votes — as president of the country. And before making this Trumpian, anti-democratic, over-the-top-interference-in-another-country’s-internal-affairs decision, Canadian diplomats spent months preparing the move with the opposition to ratchet up tensions in the South American country.
While the NDP was somewhat divided, party foreign affairs critic Hélène Laverdière endorsed Juan Guaido’s January 2019 self-declaration as president. A former Canadian diplomat, Laverdière aligned herself with Venezuela’s far right, as I detailed in a 2018 article titled “Has it become NDP policy to support US-backed coups in Latin America?” Among numerous criticisms of Venezuela’s government, Laverdière called the vice-president “a drug lord” from whom “the American government has seized billions of dollars of his assets for drug trafficking.” Laverdière should have been removed as foreign critic the day after repeating this obviously absurd claim from Venezuela’s lunatic far right. (In what may be the first ever resolution to an NDP convention calling for the removal of a party critic, the NDP Socialist Caucus submitted a motion to the party’s convention titled “Hands Off Venezuela, Remove Hélène Laverdière as NDP Foreign Affairs Critic.”)
Two months ago ago my campaign to lead the NDP released an action alert calling on people to email foreign minister Anita Anand to demand she oppose the US attack against Venezuela and our platform notes, “End state-sponsored propaganda, fearmongering, and demonization of nations resisting Western domination, including … Venezuela.”
It’s past time for the NDP to denounce Trump’s war on Venezuela.
Yves Engler
Yves Engler is Montreal-based writer and political activist. In addition to ten published books, Engler's writings have appeared in the alternative press and in mainstream publications such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and Ecologist.
