Oh, Oh Canada! Who Stands on Guard?

Oh, Oh Canada!

Who Stands on Guard?

by

Ron Coleman, Colonel (retired)

Contact the author at:

rlcoleman@falls.igs.net or fax 613-283-4117.

Editor: Neall Calvert

Cover and book designer: Fiona Raven

Front cover illustration: Josue Menjivar

Also by Ronald Coleman:

Just Watch Me! Trudeau s Tragic Legacy

© Copyright 2003 Ronald Coleman. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Note for Librarians: a cataloguing record for this book that includes Dewey Classification and US Library of Congress numbers is available from the National Library of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can be obtained from the National Library s online database at:

www.nlc-bnc.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN 1-4120-1027-6

ISBN 978-1-4122-1607-4 (ebook)

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Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Threat

2 Unprepared

3 Foreign Policy

4 Defence Policy

5 Religious War

6 Oil Dependency

7 Disarmament

8 War on Terror

9 Arms

10 War as Business

11 The Enemy Within

Separatists

First Nations

Terrorists

Globalization

Pacifism

The Nature of Man

12 Enough History—What About the Future?

The Canadian Military of the Future

United Nations

NATO

Peacekeeping and Peacemaking

13 National Interests

14 Shame

National Defence Headquarters Organizational Chart

Bibliography

About the Author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife and sons, and to the Canadian military—past, present and future. I want to make it clear at the outset that although the book is a harsh critique of the lack of an intelligent foreign policy and hence coherent defence policy, it does not diminish, in any way, the contributions of those who have, do and will serve. They are to be commended for their patriotism and dedication despite the political decisions that they have had to endure in the past few decades.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the support of my friend Don Fowler, and the assistance of two old warriors, Dave Koski and Bill St. Jean, who helped with the ideas herein. Finally, I wish to thank my overall coordinator, Fiona Raven, and my editor, Neall Calvert, for their hard work and patience.

Although I loathe labels, I have used terms like Francophone and Anglophone as well as others throughout because they have crept into the bureaucratic jargon. Despite the negative overtones they may elicit in some, that was not my intent.

Introduction

I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in September 1963, when it and its sister services were truly strong and proud, as the current recruiting campaign advertises. The year 1963 saw a change of government to the Pearson Liberals, and that’s when the slow sustained slide to military obscurity began. Paul Hellyer, the defence minister at the time, was allowed to cripple the military by first integrating headquarters and then by unifying the forces. This grand experiment was doomed from the beginning because it pitted the civilian structure within the department against the military. Concurrently and concentrically, it pitted the three forces against each other; they have remained that way ever since.

At the time I joined the RCAF, it had 52,000 personnel; today there are approximately 13,000. The Canadian Army had approximately 50,000 personnel in four brigade groups; today it has approximately 35,000 personnel, serving in four geographical areas, along with a training base at Kingston. The Royal Canadian Navy had approximately 21,000 personnel, 1 aircraft carrier, 20 destroyer escorts, 13 frigates, 10 minesweepers, 1 repair ship, 2 squadrons each of Banshee and Tracker aircraft and 1 squadron of helicopters. Today it has approximately 10,000 personnel, 12 patrol frigates, 4 destroyers, 2 auxiliary ships, 12 coastal defence vessels and 4 submarines (having great difficulty getting operational). The reserve forces at the time stood at approximately 50,000 personnel; today the figure is 20,000. Civilians in the department totalled approximately 51,000; today they total approximately 20,000.

These figures represent approximately a 75-percent reduction in military personnel, a 60-percent reduction in reserves and a 61-percent reduction in civilians. It has been impossible to determine a proper breakdown of major equipment for the air force and army due to lack of statistics; however, for the navy there has been a good record kept of the ships. Nonetheless, we have far fewer combat ships, aircraft, tanks and artillery than back then, and I would not be surprised if the percentages were about the same as the reductions in personnel. It is known that the air force today has approximately 412 aircraft, and only 135 of them can deliver offensive ordnance against the enemy. I will leave the then and now counting of equipment to someone else to calculate. Any way you spin it, the reduction has been significant. Historically, in 1963 we had just come through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War was heating up. We had a large contingent of fighter and interceptor squadrons, as well as a full army brigade in Germany; today we have none of these. How did it come to this?

The reductions are a result of an altruistic view of peacekeeping, the recruiting of pacifists to the Pearson government, and time. Like other Canadians, Pearson took Liberal efficiency and prosperity for granted. Few guessed his own priority: French Canada.1 He recruited Jean Marchand, who refused to come to Ottawa without Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Trudeau, the demonstrated socialist and pacifist. Lester Pearson eventually quit, which paved the way for the only French-Canadian in the leadership race, Pierre Trudeau, to win. The Liberal tradition of alternating English and French leaders prevailed.

Trudeau immediately made cuts to defence; he thought the money would be better spent on foreign aid. Later, a Conservative majority government under Brian Mulroney promised a turnaround in the situation in its defence white paper of 1987 but this was a ruse; instead it continued the drawdown. Mulroney gave an early signal to Washington that Canada would meet Reagan’s elaborate defence expectations… . A 1987 defence white paper proposed that nuclear-powered submarines patrol Canada’s Arctic frontier. The anti-nuclear protests that ensued were predictable; Pentagon opposition was only a little more discreet. By 1988, the proposal was dead and the offending minister had been switched to a less sensitive post.2

The new minister got the message and most everything else in the white paper was put in abeyance. The boy from Baie Comeau had a formidable but glass chin; another example of form over content. Almost nothing promised in the 1987 white paper materialized. In 1993, the Conservatives were appropriately annihilated under the uninspired leadership of Kim Campbell. Remember that photograph of her, nude and holding her judicial robes? Her election campaign revealed that the empress really had no clothes—or vision either. She bombed, and paved the way for Jean Chrétien and his three socialist majority governments to implode onto the scene.

The Chrétien governments essentially perpetuated the Trudeau doctrine in every aspect. Their black-and-blue-print for the military was unveiled in 1994. In his first budget, Paul Martin set the tone for the military. Historic defence bases, from Cornwallis in the Annapolis Valley to the B.C. coast, would close. So would two of three military colleges.3 Chrétien personally axed the new helicopter purchase, previously cut back by Kim Campbell, thus ensuring that the ancient Sea King helicopters, and many other defence programs and projects, would limp into the future. That future is the make-believe world of today’s military after decades under siege.

The 1994 white paper on defence, a statement of government defence policy, was a hopelessly unrealistic document based on an equally unrealistic foreign policy, determined more by what the government wanted the world to be like than what it was really like. The white paper’s ambiguities and illusions disguised the planned continued enfeeblement of the military. Despite growing global turmoil and the unravelling of the relative stability of the bipolar strategic stalemate characteristic of the Cold War, the government was determined that its rosy view of the future would make the military less necessary. As the new millennium approached, Trudeau’s view would prevail—Alice was truly back in Wonderland:

At last Trudeau discovered first hand the sad truth about Canada’s world standing: that within our alliances we were regarded as a free-rider on the backs of the American taxpayers and as a client-state of the Pentagon. Trudeau underlined this attitude by admitting that, Canada is in the extraordinarily fortunate position of not having to defend itself because we know darn well that the United States will defend us. They won’t let a hostile nation take over Canada to wage war on the United States. He followed up on this colonial pronouncement by reducing Canada’s forces to joke proportions and listing national defence as his cabinet’s fourteenth priority, just after price supports for hogs. What Trudeau forgot was that, in the disarmament sweepstakes, your clout is equivalent to what you throw into the pot. Since, under Trudeau, Canada became perhaps the only nation in world history to disarm itself unilaterally … 4

As a consequence, and completely opposite to the reality of events, subsequent governments embarked on a continued pull-back from alliances and expansion of soft indulgence in new areas of interest such as the Asia-Pacific and Central and South America.

The basis of Chretien’s foreign policy was the international ethnocentric beliefs of his minister of foreign affairs, Lloyd Axworthy (Lord Axworthy, as he was dubbed in the Liberal Party). Axworthy was imbued with the spirit of the Trudeau foreign and defence policies, and his contribution to the illusion was to push to have the United Nations evolve into a world government. His view was that Canada in the next century could lead the world towards a more peaceful and stable state through the projection of Canadian values and culture. Of course, for this to be so the world’s peoples would have to forget their history and overcome their propensity for tribalism and conflict. Axworthy wanted the UN to become the precursor of a world government that would resolve all disputes by nonviolent means, if possible. It was a pipe dream that would be destroyed by pipe bombs.

As it turned out, Lloyd’s view of the world was decidedly different from that of Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Manuel Noriega, Ariel Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Robert Mugabe and lesser terrorists and military men schooled in Mao’s view that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But through the UN, Axworthy hoped, the guns would eventually be expropriated, a process now underway in Canada beginning with Bill C-68… .

A state has essentially three tools at its disposal in dealing with other states. First, there is aid. (Canada is not setting any records with this tool, despite the hyperbole ever present with political rhetoric.) Second, there is military power. (Canada is not capable of projecting military power. We seek to operate under the UN auspices and when we do we join ad-hoc coalitions as a (very) junior partner and one that must avoid medium-to high-intensity combat. In addition we need considerable support in getting there and staying there.) Third, there is moral suasion. (Canada is big on this, as it requires few resources. Unfortunately, you cannot employ it with terrorists or rogue states.)

In summary, Canada’s ability to conduct foreign affairs is next to nil. We are finding this out more and more as our levels of both aid and military preparedness decrease. It doesn’t help that our political leaders, of all parties, continue to cling to the illusion that Canada has middle-power status. This is easy to assert but difficult to find the evidence for. Nevertheless, the government continues with this policy on foreign affairs and concurrently continues to diminish the size and punch of the Canadian military. Projecting values and culture is a policy that has not fared well over the centuries in the battles between good and evil. Nonetheless, there is always hope and the view that we can avoid the despair and ruin that violence leaves in its wake by isolating ourselves under the protection of our mighty neighbour to the south. This is an advantage that only Canada possesses. I have the nagging sense, unfortunately, that someday we will pay dearly for this… .

It is true that Canada is blessed with geography. In the sense of stability and security, it is a bonus to have only one other country on your border and one that shares your political and economic underpinnings. It also helps that it is the only remaining superpower (although not the only nuclear power). And then there are those nasty chemical and biological weapons that terrorists have or are seeking. Democracy and capitalism (considerably restrained in Canada through government intervention) are both difficult and beneficial, yet there are others who believe in less successful systems of governance and commercial enterprise. Thankfully our only neighbour has a political system and commercial system that stem from the same philosophies, although with a different political structure. With three vast oceans and the United States as our neighbours we are blessed indeed insofar as threats from our borders are concerned—although not so from the air or sea.

However, as recent events have shown, we may not be as secure from the land as once thought. In essence, our foreign policy and defence policy as well as the military organization and structure are based on the Cold War posture. We are now engaged, whether we like it or not, in a terrorist conflict based on guerrilla and urban warfare. The target is not primarily the opposition’s military but its people. In order to combat this we must ignore, for the time being, the concepts of a just war and the niceties of the Geneva Convention, as they only apply to us. The enemy is not predisposed to recognize or follow these strictures, and in order to counter effectively we may have to bend them as well. This current conflict is imbued with strong religious overtones whereby all sides believe that God is on their side. This is not new, of course, it is just renewed as the justification for war. But do not be confused: the terrorists are involved in a jihad against us—it’s a holy war, in their view!

Unfortunately for Canada we may not be able to sit this one out or participate minimally.