Completely true, with one exception, the commencement of the shunning.
I retired from the CAF in 2020; prior I was a delegate to many international military fora. I can tell you distinctly that the shunning began shortly after the 2015 election. By 2017 our principal allies, whilst still courteous, were being more pointed about their observations on our defence program shortcomings. By 2018 they weren't even being polite anymore and Canada was well ensconced at the kid's table. We were not part of contemporary warfighting discussions nor advanced tech nor emerging threats working groups.
Our acquisitions programs are impossibly byzantine, constipated, and focused exclusively on regional or Canadian Industrial development rather than delivering military capability with alacrity. It takes a decade to acquire new capital equipment. And our allies know this, as do our adversaries.
Canada has stepped up alright...to training missions. Canada LOVES training missions. They are low risk, low impact, and low cost. The bulk of the training we do is individual training to third and fourth tier trainees. Essentially we are teaching people to dig trenches, walk in a straight line, and shoot straight, essential skills for WW-II. All the while lecturing our allies about feminist principles, diversity, and inclusion, great stuff for progressive woke soundbites bit utterly meaningless to real warfighting capability.
But lets put the culpability where it squarely belongs. It's not the successive governments which have beasted the Armed Services, it's the Canadian People. The people want a lightly armed constabulary that responds to "climate emergencies," and plucks the hapless from the seas; they do not want a credible fighting force, never have. It's long past time we admitted it openly.
As a trading nation, Canada must engage with the world. We rely on the free movement of goods, which is mainly secured by an increasingly weary US. The bargain we get out of just living up to our NATO committments is the deal of a lifetime and we are collectively fools to even put that at risk.
Infrastructure, defense -- these are fundamental things governments deliver. They cost what they cost. We've got to stop playing the pauper when it comes to these kinds of things! The world knows we can afford to do more and choose not to. And, I fear their collective patience is running out.
Mr. Quinn has succinctly summarized the position in which Canada now finds itself. The current government, and possibly a majority of Canadians, seem to think that we can continue to spend money on all manner of new domestic programs to the exclusion of defense. That may have been the case several years ago, but is no longer.
As has been pointed out in so many places, the world is a very different place than it was 10 years ago. Canada depends on a peaceful world in order to thrive since so much of our economy is based on world trade. We will need to make some hard choices in the near future. We do not have enough money to pay for everything.
It's not just the current government. It's every government we've had for 40 years. And it's because Canadians themselves don't give a shit about national defense because we've been living in a bubble. His last paragraph nails it: it's not Canadian politicians that need to decide what our military is good for. It's Canadians themselves. Thankfully people do seem to be waking up to reality.
How much will Canadians be willing to cut Medicare, OAS/GIS, equalization, addiction enablement, and programs for First Nations to find more money for our collaborative defence?
If we won’t give on those, will we accept higher taxes? Maybe ask everyone to forgo their carbon tax rebates? But then the Conservatives won’t be able to Axe the Tax, will they? There’s always Soak the Rich, I suppose.
Do Canadians, or those who hang out here while they buff their resumes to try to immigrate to the U.S., even *want* to be soldiers for the Crown? What makes us think that we could even *spend* 2% of GDP? What would we spend it *on*?
Iceland has no military. For all intents and purposes neither does New Zealand. Are we feeling lucky, make it a trifecta? You can make the argument that the U.S. is more afraid of the Russians taking over Canada than Canadians are. That was certainly the game the countries of Western Europe played all during the Cold War, to spend next to nothing on their own defence even with the Russian Bear right next door. I guess you have to actually live under communism as the Baltic republics and the Warsaw Pact countries did, in order to properly fear it. But since Canada never has, we shrug.
Lets us the money from the LNG that Germany, Japan. Greece, Ukraine, Poland and South Korea have asked us to deliver. Oops, I forgot there was no business case for selling our abundant commodity that would generate huge royalties and reduce the use of coal ...
There is no long term business case for selling LNG to Europe. What's the point on spending tens of billions of dollars on pipelines and export terminals that will be built just in time for Europe to be most of the way to net zero in 5+ years' time? They are rapidly decarbonizing. There was certainly an opportunity had we seized it, but we're about 20 years too late at this point.
Perhaps people smarter than you and me see the business case. Just allow them to use private funds to pursue LNG. That's all they are asking for.
They don't need politicians and their supporters, folks who have never proven their business smarts, telling them what is a solid business case or not.
Europe is not going to be net zero in five years. No country is. Net zero implies sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere as fast as you emit it from burning, and from agriculture and cement-making. There is no technology that has been demonstrated to do this at the scale required or at any realistic cost given the energy it consumes. So we are talking gross zero: no CO2 emissions at all. Ain’t gonna happen. Once you have weather-dependent electricity up to about 50% the grid starts to destabilize as supply can’t be made to match demand, unless you magically invent storage systems and have natural gas turbines for instant backup.
The risks for Canada’s LNG are that the pipeline goes to the wrong ocean — Thanks, Quebec! Maybe you could load some of that James Bay electricity into a ship and send that to Europe, eh? — and that Europe will de-industrialize to where it can’t afford LNG anyway. If everyone reverts to donkey carts, water wheels, and candles, they won’t need LNG, will they.
There isn’t a single nation on earth who has reduced their carbon emissions. Not one. This is not consistent with rapid decarbonization. This does not mean that we don’t need to, but we do need to be realistic.
Renouncing a true military in favor of some sort of civil defense force, becoming Costa Rica North and letting the Americans secure the continent on our behalf is certainly an option, but the tradeoff there is that we could no longer tell ourselves or others that we actually matter in global affairs and the US would have every right to dictate many aspects of our internal affairs as a result. There's always tradeoffs.
Oh yes, certainly. There's no free lunch. The United States reserves for itself the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the Western Hemisphere where it feels its interests are threatened, and it has, many times. If the Northwest Passage becomes ice-free, Canada's sovereignty there will be tested. The world, and particularly the U.S., does not accept our claim that the waters around the Arctic Islands are Canadian territorial waters. If they become reliably navigable, the claim will become relevant and we have no meaningful way to assert that sovereignty, other than it being too cold and too remote for foreigners to mount military operations except at great cost. That would be an example of how we would lose our independent ability to run our own affairs.
Oh and I should have mentioned that reforming a single program, OAS, can result in tens of billions of annual savings that would offset the increase in military spending singlehandedly. OAS is a ticking time bomb that Harper tried to defuse or delay, but Trudeau saw fit to speed up when he changed it back to 65. Our spending on seniors is unconscionable at this point, the boomers are the richest generation in history and have massively benefited from the housing crisis. And we keep shoveling money at them anyway.
OAS -- welfare for old people -- is partially means-tested, being taxable and clawed back above ~$100,000 annual income, which is a pretty generous income for each of two retired people. But it should be paid only to seniors who are truly destitute, which would be a tiny fraction of the number of people it's currently paid to. And then of course there's "free" health care.....(Don't get me started!)
Canada increasing its defense spending to 2% of GDP is part of the solution, but only a part. Perhaps even more important is spending what we do spend, much more efficiently.
Start with procurement. Military procurement in Canada is primarily a tool for regional development, for funneling funds to target regions and companies, and for grandiose political announcements. Obtaining weapons and weapons systems seems decidedly secondary. Take shipbuilding. We are building ships in three different shipyards. This foregoes economies of scale and of learning by doing -- the first ship or two in a given shipyard will always be orders of magnitude costlier than subsequent ones. But the pork has to be spread out, to B.C., Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces. Overruns and delays become a feature, not a bug -- something to be desired, to make the jobs, and the profits, last longer.
Instead, we could acquire ships at one tenth the cost, as other nations do. We could order the hulls from shipyards in South Korea, who already have the expertise and the economies of scale, provisioning customized armaments as necessary. But of course that would defeat the primary purpose.
There is also the recruiting crisis. We are not serious about recruiting. Instead of incentives, we erect barriers to young people thinking about serving, including excessively long delays in processing applications. Another problem that is unlikely to be solved by increasing total spending on defense.
I fear more funding. Cultural rot has consumed the Canadian Military to the point that a serial rapist and murderer was able to occupy a senior position, successive Chiefs of Defence engaged in sexual misconduct and a Vice Admiral was wrongly dismissed for allegedly leaking documents and subsequently settled for millions of dollars. The rot continues at the Federal government level which largely views military spending as a money conduit into core ridings and old money families.
So basically the same MO since at least the Roman times. That's not just Canadian, it's always been that way.
Canada is worse though in that our elite still have a resource colony mindset, the UK and now the US will take care of us. It's pathetic for a country of our age and size.
Canada has not defined the missions it wants the Armed Forces to fulfill. We’re basically running on fading muscle memory from the middle of the Cold War. When you don’t know the mission, you can’t define what kind of force is needed to perform it. I think even if we defined our mission as territorial defense and emergency response, we’d still find the Armed Forces are underequipped, undersized, and don’t have the correct geographic deployment.
Canada should declare its intention to specialize in Arctic Sovereignty and Arctic Defense, and spend the remaining 0.5% of its 2% goal on that objective. With Russian (and no doubt Chinese) designs on the Arctic and its resources, now is the time to step up and get the job done.
Thank you for this insightful column. For me, the question is not what choices we should make for our military, although obviously these are important. But rather is the military a priority for us? If so, then we should begin by making this a whole of government priority. Unfortunately I don't see any current political party that cares about anything than their own survival.
Great summary of Canada’s decline in prestige in self defence matters. The author refers to the sidearm replacement issue. It took over 70 years for Canada to replace their 1935 pistol technology with a newer version.
My own view is that the dominance in Canadian politics of Quebec based leadership and influence is directly related to this decline. With exceptions for individual bravery, Having been conquered by the English the French colonists were understandably reluctant to take up arms to support the British. Witness the WW I and I conscription riots, “zombie” non overseas regiments in WWII, etc. This Quebec tradition IMHO lies behind the reluctance to spend any more than the bare ass minimum on defence when you have big brother next door.
The Mexican constitution as I understand it specifies that their armed forces are not to be used outside Mexican soil. Adopting a similar policy would reflect the Canadian reality. Then there would be no need for Canadian politicians to go strut on the world military stages while more or less secretly being viewed with something between pity and contempt by those with a real stake in the game. Then they could focus on their real role of assisting with domestic disasters and population control.
Canada is a multicultural, multilingual country where the French control the levers of the federal government including its priorities. Quebec is a pacifist inward looking society. It just is.
The problems stem from the majority English wanting something else but not controlling those levers.
Ontario is so deathly afraid of Quebec leaving they basically have given the car keys and a gas card to them to stay in Canada. What that means is that Canadians will live under their cultural wants and needs, which include one of the largest welfare states in the world (to replace the church), the weirdo Canada Health Act and their obsession over equality at the expense of everything else, the anti fossil fuel obsessions, their top down media control, their economic model of digiriste state planning, etc.
The armed forces issues are just a symptom of great more foundational problems in Canada. We don't know who the hell we are and what this place is about.
Great way to say it! You described the issue to a T.
What you have is a loveless marriage where both partners are afraid of the cost of a divorce so stay together barely tolerating each other. Even though they know deeply down both would be better off on their own.
And you have one, Ontario, worried that the other will be happier than them if they split. He also worries that the kids, the West, will be corrupted by bad influences, the Americans, if he isn't there to take care of his family.
Well and eloquently stated. As have many others stated similarly. However…
It has no effect on JT and I have come to see that he uses criticism of his policies or lack thereof as a means of feeding his perceived strengths. Very similar to the approach of his father and others who tend to govern in a non-democratic way — even though they actually believe they are not doing so.
Not at all complicated, we are either inside or we are outside NATO. Right now we are choosing to be outside this mutual defence alliance. We are up a certain creek without a paddle. Governments first responsibility is to the security of its citizens.
Nothing will change until the Americans turn the screws. Until the rules for the "rules based order" the LNDP and their Franco/Urban Plpacifistic coalition turn against them.
Canada getting kicked out of the G7, NATO or the US just ignoring Canadian jurisdiction in general needs to happen.
Right now this is all words of consequences, but everyday visible consequences to the common Canadian haven't happened yet, so the results show being feckless works for us.
Sport on. The government of Canada doesn't care about the military, and hasn't for 3 decades. We don't punch anything. We don't even slap fight. Right now, I would say it's debatable whether we're even a functioning fighting force. This is a party-wide issue; the NDP being the worst pretending we don't even need a military. It's a national embarrassment, and comments from both other party's make it quite clear that they don't care. That we're doing nothing while running $50 billion deficits makes it crystal clear how much trouble Canada is in, and the cost of having no useful leadership.
If Trudeau id going to use a boxing analogy, then Canada, a feather weight, is in the ring with heavyweights !!I If Canada wants to be in the heavyweight division, it better put some military weight on. “ We’re back” lol
I believe Canada should focus training high speciality teams. We are so, so far behind it will take years if not decades to advance all the forces to capable capacity, but that should be out goal.
Once again a writer on the topic of defense is working from the “obvious” assumption of a Trump WH in November. Time to reevaluate that, or update these pieces to current polling trends south of the border. Otherwise, yes, we suck on defense.
Morning Dean, I hope you are well. I am making no assumptions on what happens in the US in November. Indeed I don’t think it matters. The letter I reference was from a bipartisan group so to be honest I think there is a broader concern across the US system. So thinking one party is better than the other is, I firmly believe, a false hope …
I don’t believe it matters who POTUS will be come January. The relationship is driven by commercial issues and Canada is basically a satellite. On a personal level President Trump's contempt for JT was well documented. And how do you think a strong woman like President Harris will react to someone who has a history of filling his Cabinet with quota queens and promptly firing any who dare get uppity with him?
Thank you. I certainly agree that an honest national conversation about what "we want" and, more to the point, what we need is long overdue.
In my view, no self-respecting country that wants to remain sovereign and independent can do so without maintaining a credible military force AND the industrial and educational wherewithal to ensure its supply and regular renewal.
Most Canadians, however, seem to frame discussion of defence in terms of "what do our allies want" and "what are the Americans telling us what to do".
Completely true, with one exception, the commencement of the shunning.
I retired from the CAF in 2020; prior I was a delegate to many international military fora. I can tell you distinctly that the shunning began shortly after the 2015 election. By 2017 our principal allies, whilst still courteous, were being more pointed about their observations on our defence program shortcomings. By 2018 they weren't even being polite anymore and Canada was well ensconced at the kid's table. We were not part of contemporary warfighting discussions nor advanced tech nor emerging threats working groups.
Our acquisitions programs are impossibly byzantine, constipated, and focused exclusively on regional or Canadian Industrial development rather than delivering military capability with alacrity. It takes a decade to acquire new capital equipment. And our allies know this, as do our adversaries.
Canada has stepped up alright...to training missions. Canada LOVES training missions. They are low risk, low impact, and low cost. The bulk of the training we do is individual training to third and fourth tier trainees. Essentially we are teaching people to dig trenches, walk in a straight line, and shoot straight, essential skills for WW-II. All the while lecturing our allies about feminist principles, diversity, and inclusion, great stuff for progressive woke soundbites bit utterly meaningless to real warfighting capability.
But lets put the culpability where it squarely belongs. It's not the successive governments which have beasted the Armed Services, it's the Canadian People. The people want a lightly armed constabulary that responds to "climate emergencies," and plucks the hapless from the seas; they do not want a credible fighting force, never have. It's long past time we admitted it openly.
As a trading nation, Canada must engage with the world. We rely on the free movement of goods, which is mainly secured by an increasingly weary US. The bargain we get out of just living up to our NATO committments is the deal of a lifetime and we are collectively fools to even put that at risk.
Infrastructure, defense -- these are fundamental things governments deliver. They cost what they cost. We've got to stop playing the pauper when it comes to these kinds of things! The world knows we can afford to do more and choose not to. And, I fear their collective patience is running out.
Mr. Quinn has succinctly summarized the position in which Canada now finds itself. The current government, and possibly a majority of Canadians, seem to think that we can continue to spend money on all manner of new domestic programs to the exclusion of defense. That may have been the case several years ago, but is no longer.
As has been pointed out in so many places, the world is a very different place than it was 10 years ago. Canada depends on a peaceful world in order to thrive since so much of our economy is based on world trade. We will need to make some hard choices in the near future. We do not have enough money to pay for everything.
It's not just the current government. It's every government we've had for 40 years. And it's because Canadians themselves don't give a shit about national defense because we've been living in a bubble. His last paragraph nails it: it's not Canadian politicians that need to decide what our military is good for. It's Canadians themselves. Thankfully people do seem to be waking up to reality.
How much will Canadians be willing to cut Medicare, OAS/GIS, equalization, addiction enablement, and programs for First Nations to find more money for our collaborative defence?
If we won’t give on those, will we accept higher taxes? Maybe ask everyone to forgo their carbon tax rebates? But then the Conservatives won’t be able to Axe the Tax, will they? There’s always Soak the Rich, I suppose.
Do Canadians, or those who hang out here while they buff their resumes to try to immigrate to the U.S., even *want* to be soldiers for the Crown? What makes us think that we could even *spend* 2% of GDP? What would we spend it *on*?
Iceland has no military. For all intents and purposes neither does New Zealand. Are we feeling lucky, make it a trifecta? You can make the argument that the U.S. is more afraid of the Russians taking over Canada than Canadians are. That was certainly the game the countries of Western Europe played all during the Cold War, to spend next to nothing on their own defence even with the Russian Bear right next door. I guess you have to actually live under communism as the Baltic republics and the Warsaw Pact countries did, in order to properly fear it. But since Canada never has, we shrug.
Lets us the money from the LNG that Germany, Japan. Greece, Ukraine, Poland and South Korea have asked us to deliver. Oops, I forgot there was no business case for selling our abundant commodity that would generate huge royalties and reduce the use of coal ...
There is no long term business case for selling LNG to Europe. What's the point on spending tens of billions of dollars on pipelines and export terminals that will be built just in time for Europe to be most of the way to net zero in 5+ years' time? They are rapidly decarbonizing. There was certainly an opportunity had we seized it, but we're about 20 years too late at this point.
Perhaps people smarter than you and me see the business case. Just allow them to use private funds to pursue LNG. That's all they are asking for.
They don't need politicians and their supporters, folks who have never proven their business smarts, telling them what is a solid business case or not.
Europe is not going to be net zero in five years. No country is. Net zero implies sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere as fast as you emit it from burning, and from agriculture and cement-making. There is no technology that has been demonstrated to do this at the scale required or at any realistic cost given the energy it consumes. So we are talking gross zero: no CO2 emissions at all. Ain’t gonna happen. Once you have weather-dependent electricity up to about 50% the grid starts to destabilize as supply can’t be made to match demand, unless you magically invent storage systems and have natural gas turbines for instant backup.
The risks for Canada’s LNG are that the pipeline goes to the wrong ocean — Thanks, Quebec! Maybe you could load some of that James Bay electricity into a ship and send that to Europe, eh? — and that Europe will de-industrialize to where it can’t afford LNG anyway. If everyone reverts to donkey carts, water wheels, and candles, they won’t need LNG, will they.
There isn’t a single nation on earth who has reduced their carbon emissions. Not one. This is not consistent with rapid decarbonization. This does not mean that we don’t need to, but we do need to be realistic.
Please provide proof substantiating your claim that carbon emissions have not fallen in some countries.
Renouncing a true military in favor of some sort of civil defense force, becoming Costa Rica North and letting the Americans secure the continent on our behalf is certainly an option, but the tradeoff there is that we could no longer tell ourselves or others that we actually matter in global affairs and the US would have every right to dictate many aspects of our internal affairs as a result. There's always tradeoffs.
Oh yes, certainly. There's no free lunch. The United States reserves for itself the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the Western Hemisphere where it feels its interests are threatened, and it has, many times. If the Northwest Passage becomes ice-free, Canada's sovereignty there will be tested. The world, and particularly the U.S., does not accept our claim that the waters around the Arctic Islands are Canadian territorial waters. If they become reliably navigable, the claim will become relevant and we have no meaningful way to assert that sovereignty, other than it being too cold and too remote for foreigners to mount military operations except at great cost. That would be an example of how we would lose our independent ability to run our own affairs.
Oh and I should have mentioned that reforming a single program, OAS, can result in tens of billions of annual savings that would offset the increase in military spending singlehandedly. OAS is a ticking time bomb that Harper tried to defuse or delay, but Trudeau saw fit to speed up when he changed it back to 65. Our spending on seniors is unconscionable at this point, the boomers are the richest generation in history and have massively benefited from the housing crisis. And we keep shoveling money at them anyway.
OAS -- welfare for old people -- is partially means-tested, being taxable and clawed back above ~$100,000 annual income, which is a pretty generous income for each of two retired people. But it should be paid only to seniors who are truly destitute, which would be a tiny fraction of the number of people it's currently paid to. And then of course there's "free" health care.....(Don't get me started!)
OAS is basically a bribe to boomers to vote for the LNDP. All at the expense of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It's a weird form of eating the young.
The me generation is so selfish in actions of not words.
Canada increasing its defense spending to 2% of GDP is part of the solution, but only a part. Perhaps even more important is spending what we do spend, much more efficiently.
Start with procurement. Military procurement in Canada is primarily a tool for regional development, for funneling funds to target regions and companies, and for grandiose political announcements. Obtaining weapons and weapons systems seems decidedly secondary. Take shipbuilding. We are building ships in three different shipyards. This foregoes economies of scale and of learning by doing -- the first ship or two in a given shipyard will always be orders of magnitude costlier than subsequent ones. But the pork has to be spread out, to B.C., Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces. Overruns and delays become a feature, not a bug -- something to be desired, to make the jobs, and the profits, last longer.
Instead, we could acquire ships at one tenth the cost, as other nations do. We could order the hulls from shipyards in South Korea, who already have the expertise and the economies of scale, provisioning customized armaments as necessary. But of course that would defeat the primary purpose.
There is also the recruiting crisis. We are not serious about recruiting. Instead of incentives, we erect barriers to young people thinking about serving, including excessively long delays in processing applications. Another problem that is unlikely to be solved by increasing total spending on defense.
I fear more funding. Cultural rot has consumed the Canadian Military to the point that a serial rapist and murderer was able to occupy a senior position, successive Chiefs of Defence engaged in sexual misconduct and a Vice Admiral was wrongly dismissed for allegedly leaking documents and subsequently settled for millions of dollars. The rot continues at the Federal government level which largely views military spending as a money conduit into core ridings and old money families.
So basically the same MO since at least the Roman times. That's not just Canadian, it's always been that way.
Canada is worse though in that our elite still have a resource colony mindset, the UK and now the US will take care of us. It's pathetic for a country of our age and size.
Canada has not defined the missions it wants the Armed Forces to fulfill. We’re basically running on fading muscle memory from the middle of the Cold War. When you don’t know the mission, you can’t define what kind of force is needed to perform it. I think even if we defined our mission as territorial defense and emergency response, we’d still find the Armed Forces are underequipped, undersized, and don’t have the correct geographic deployment.
Canada should declare its intention to specialize in Arctic Sovereignty and Arctic Defense, and spend the remaining 0.5% of its 2% goal on that objective. With Russian (and no doubt Chinese) designs on the Arctic and its resources, now is the time to step up and get the job done.
Thank you for this insightful column. For me, the question is not what choices we should make for our military, although obviously these are important. But rather is the military a priority for us? If so, then we should begin by making this a whole of government priority. Unfortunately I don't see any current political party that cares about anything than their own survival.
Great summary of Canada’s decline in prestige in self defence matters. The author refers to the sidearm replacement issue. It took over 70 years for Canada to replace their 1935 pistol technology with a newer version.
My own view is that the dominance in Canadian politics of Quebec based leadership and influence is directly related to this decline. With exceptions for individual bravery, Having been conquered by the English the French colonists were understandably reluctant to take up arms to support the British. Witness the WW I and I conscription riots, “zombie” non overseas regiments in WWII, etc. This Quebec tradition IMHO lies behind the reluctance to spend any more than the bare ass minimum on defence when you have big brother next door.
The Mexican constitution as I understand it specifies that their armed forces are not to be used outside Mexican soil. Adopting a similar policy would reflect the Canadian reality. Then there would be no need for Canadian politicians to go strut on the world military stages while more or less secretly being viewed with something between pity and contempt by those with a real stake in the game. Then they could focus on their real role of assisting with domestic disasters and population control.
Canada is a multicultural, multilingual country where the French control the levers of the federal government including its priorities. Quebec is a pacifist inward looking society. It just is.
The problems stem from the majority English wanting something else but not controlling those levers.
Ontario is so deathly afraid of Quebec leaving they basically have given the car keys and a gas card to them to stay in Canada. What that means is that Canadians will live under their cultural wants and needs, which include one of the largest welfare states in the world (to replace the church), the weirdo Canada Health Act and their obsession over equality at the expense of everything else, the anti fossil fuel obsessions, their top down media control, their economic model of digiriste state planning, etc.
The armed forces issues are just a symptom of great more foundational problems in Canada. We don't know who the hell we are and what this place is about.
Great way to say it! You described the issue to a T.
What you have is a loveless marriage where both partners are afraid of the cost of a divorce so stay together barely tolerating each other. Even though they know deeply down both would be better off on their own.
And you have one, Ontario, worried that the other will be happier than them if they split. He also worries that the kids, the West, will be corrupted by bad influences, the Americans, if he isn't there to take care of his family.
It's so pathetic, mostly on English Canada.
Well and eloquently stated. As have many others stated similarly. However…
It has no effect on JT and I have come to see that he uses criticism of his policies or lack thereof as a means of feeding his perceived strengths. Very similar to the approach of his father and others who tend to govern in a non-democratic way — even though they actually believe they are not doing so.
Not at all complicated, we are either inside or we are outside NATO. Right now we are choosing to be outside this mutual defence alliance. We are up a certain creek without a paddle. Governments first responsibility is to the security of its citizens.
Nothing will change until the Americans turn the screws. Until the rules for the "rules based order" the LNDP and their Franco/Urban Plpacifistic coalition turn against them.
Canada getting kicked out of the G7, NATO or the US just ignoring Canadian jurisdiction in general needs to happen.
Right now this is all words of consequences, but everyday visible consequences to the common Canadian haven't happened yet, so the results show being feckless works for us.
Sport on. The government of Canada doesn't care about the military, and hasn't for 3 decades. We don't punch anything. We don't even slap fight. Right now, I would say it's debatable whether we're even a functioning fighting force. This is a party-wide issue; the NDP being the worst pretending we don't even need a military. It's a national embarrassment, and comments from both other party's make it quite clear that they don't care. That we're doing nothing while running $50 billion deficits makes it crystal clear how much trouble Canada is in, and the cost of having no useful leadership.
If Trudeau id going to use a boxing analogy, then Canada, a feather weight, is in the ring with heavyweights !!I If Canada wants to be in the heavyweight division, it better put some military weight on. “ We’re back” lol
I believe Canada should focus training high speciality teams. We are so, so far behind it will take years if not decades to advance all the forces to capable capacity, but that should be out goal.
Once again a writer on the topic of defense is working from the “obvious” assumption of a Trump WH in November. Time to reevaluate that, or update these pieces to current polling trends south of the border. Otherwise, yes, we suck on defense.
Morning Dean, I hope you are well. I am making no assumptions on what happens in the US in November. Indeed I don’t think it matters. The letter I reference was from a bipartisan group so to be honest I think there is a broader concern across the US system. So thinking one party is better than the other is, I firmly believe, a false hope …
Appreciated.
I don’t believe it matters who POTUS will be come January. The relationship is driven by commercial issues and Canada is basically a satellite. On a personal level President Trump's contempt for JT was well documented. And how do you think a strong woman like President Harris will react to someone who has a history of filling his Cabinet with quota queens and promptly firing any who dare get uppity with him?
Thank you. I certainly agree that an honest national conversation about what "we want" and, more to the point, what we need is long overdue.
In my view, no self-respecting country that wants to remain sovereign and independent can do so without maintaining a credible military force AND the industrial and educational wherewithal to ensure its supply and regular renewal.
Most Canadians, however, seem to frame discussion of defence in terms of "what do our allies want" and "what are the Americans telling us what to do".
It is pathetic (and very self-destructive).