Matt Gurney: Are we lying about our values, or do we just think everything will fix itself?

Fourteen months after Chrystia Freeland went to D.C. to say what the democracies must do, we are not doing those things.

By: Matt Gurney

In November, I attended the annual Halifax International Security Forum, hosted by Washington, D.C.-based HFX. The forum brings together senior military officers, international security and development experts, diplomats and others from across the democracies for three days of conversation and presentations on the state of the global order. This year's conference was, as you can imagine, pretty bleak.

On the one hand, you're in one of Canada's most gorgeous cities, in a fantastic hotel. You're seeing old friends left and right. The food is excellent. Plenty of bars are available to meet your needs on that front. It is, simply put, a great way to spend a weekend. On the other hand, we were there to gab about the fact that the entire fucking world is on fire.

Last year, the Middle East was calm. Ukraine's recent counter-offensive had been successful and allied support seemed assured. Now, Ukraine is losing men by the thousands to slightly advance the front, Russia is rebuilding its armaments base faster than the West, the allies are going wobbly on Ukraine (and the large Ukrainian delegation in Halifax very much knew it), plus, the Middle East has exploded again into yet another catastrophic bloodbath. The Houthi rebels seem determined to take a shot at any commercial ship that dares sail through one of the world's most critical trade chokepoints. Remember how freaked out people were when that ship got stuck in the Suez? Now imagine an oil tanker going kaboom in the Red Sea. 

It's not great, I guess is the summary of all that. Things could be better. 

My friend Paul Wells was at the forum, too. He was much faster than I was at collecting his thoughts and churning out a post-Halifax column. Last month, he wrote something that I think captured the mood well:

It was in this context — of a world growing constantly more dangerous in constantly more complex ways — that so many hallway conversations in Halifax featured variations of the observation that Canada is increasingly close to being a failed state.

Calling Canada a “failed state” would be a stretch in most areas, to put it mildly, even for me. But in terms of defence and our commitment to our allies? The shoe fits. National Defence Minister Bill Blair said some variation of “Canada knows it must do more” about a billion times over the course of that rainy Halifax weekend, and okay, but, like, when? Later?

As I munched on the delicious shrimp and drank the good coffee, a thought began rattling around in my brain. How fast could Canada move? What is the upper limit of speed for a Canadian government response? Remember that the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was a total surprise. That war has thus far remained generally contained, the best efforts of the Houthis notwithstanding, but we could have all gone to bed on the sixth and had a full-on Middle Eastern regional clusterfuck by, what, the ninth?

Canada isn't completely incapable of rapid responses; my Line colleague Andrew Potter observed in a sharp 2021 National Post column that governments specialize in line with their political geography, and Canada's federal government is good at transfer payments. The reason CERB and CEBA and the rest were stood up so fast, so successfully during the pandemic, was that that was simply tapping into an existing Canadian strength.

What if we need to do other things? I don't think we have much of a general ability to pivot in a hurry to establish new initiatives or responses, and for our existing resources, we just don't have any excess capacity for an emergency response. In many areas, don't even have sufficient capacity to maintain a baseline level of reasonable quality, come to think of it.

So yeah. 

As I left Halifax and flew home, jotting down a few notes for this and a future column over a truly gargantuan bowl of airport restaurant chowder, my mind actually drifted back to October of 2022, when Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was in Washington, D.C. She gave a speech at the Brookings Institution; I reviewed the speech then in a column here in The Line. It was, and remains, a good speech. Freeland is no dummy. Her view of the history of the last few decades basically aligns with my own. Her suggestions for what Canada and the other Western powers must do also, at least generally, accords with mine.

But gosh, I wrote then, it's kinda hard to take Freeland seriously here. Not because of what she's saying. But because of her job: she is the deputy PM of a government that was, I noted a year ago, very much not doing the things that she was saying Western governments needed to be doing. 

Here's a snippet from my 2022 column:

There's a line in Freeland's speech that really jumped out at me. ..."It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated [the post-Cold War] era," she said. She's right! Here's the thing, though: it's equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government's own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. ... Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren't. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government's record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.

And I got to wondering. How are we doing today? Fourteen months is at least enough time to notice any renewed effort or shifted priorities, right?

On the military front, Canada has actually made some meaningful investments since that speech was given. We have announced deals for new transport and refuelling jets — desperately needed and long overdue. We more recently announced a plan to sole-source new surveillance planes, also desperately needed and long overdue. We also, just this week, announced that we are procuring a fleet of large, long-ranged, armed surveillance drones, to patrol our remote air and sea frontiers, after a mere two decades of mulling it over.

There ends the good news, sadly. Most of these procurements are many years away from actually being in service. And even once we have them, as good as the new equipment will be, the biggest problem for the military today is a crippling personnel shortage. The military is, to be blunt, a disaster. Far worse than is generally known. I've been covering military and defence issues for longer than I care to recount, and I can tell you plainly, dear readers, that the level of panicked leaking and lamenting coming out of the Canadian Armed Forces is like nothing I've ever seen. We don’t have the troops, sailors and aircrew to meet even basic obligations. Training is falling behind. The in-service availability of equipment and vehicles is appallingly low for lack of trained maintenance personnel and money for spare parts and equipment.

This is showing up in operations. The army doesn’t have enough soldiers to meet every commitment. The air force has cut back on operations. The navy’s top admiral is openly speaking, in public, about the crisis in his service.

We at The Line often talk about the Canadian love of talking about inputs instead of outputs. It's easier to say "Our government has committed X dollars over Y years to address Societal Problem Z" than it is to actually ever have to answer to the public about why Z is somehow still getting worse. New procurements are an input; the desired output is a functional Canadian Armed Forces, capable of meeting its domestic obligations, honouring our treaty commitments and also being prepared for any unexpected contingencies. We do not have that military today. We cannot have that military for years. It would take massive investments and sustained effort to begin fixing this problem.

That is not happening. Hell, we took Anita Anand, one of Justin Trudeau's better ministers and replaced her with Blair, a man for whom that has never been said. I can tell you with certainty that our allies, and our senior military commanders, had no trouble reading between those lines. Trudeau thought the military mattered, briefly, but then he stopped thinking that, and here we are.

So, 14 months out from Freeland's speech and on the military front, well ... Merry Christmas, or something?

But wait! There's more!

Freeland's speech also talked about other ways Canada could support its allies, and democracies in general. Some of it was vague and aspirational — hard to measure or follow-up on. But she was specific about two things: providing our threatened allies and the democracies broadly with a stable, democratic and reliable source of critical strategic resources. Energy, for example. And minerals.

Fourteen months later, how are we doing on those fronts?

I'm not an expert in either area, but I know experts in both. Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta (I literally copied that bio right off his webpage there). He is also, simply put, one of the smartest guys on the energy file in this country. I called him this week and found him grading papers, which is probably why he was so willing to talk with me. I explained to him what I was doing with the Brookings speech, and asked him if there was anything he could point to over the last 14 months as signs that we'd gotten serious and were doing as Freeland had said we would and must.

Nope!

"By any metric, it's worse today," Leach said. Two months ago, he noted, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trudeau government's energy policies. "Now, there are no clear processes to get approvals for anything," he added, except, somewhat ironically, pipelines, whose approvals process wasn't included in the court ruling. I asked him if this was something the Trudeau government had done to itself, or if it was a victim of happenstance, and he said that some of the legislation they were dealing with dated back to the Harper era — before their time — but that in general, the Trudeau government hadn't handled this well. "They messed up. They assumed they had powers they didn't have, and didn't make the arguments for those powers. They didn't think about the framing. They had to earn that. They didn't."

Leach did raise some important points that were in the federal government's favour, or at least took some of the heat off them. Frankly, he gave me a ton of great stuff, more than I can use here, but suffice it to say that he noted not all of Canada's problems on this file are federal. The provinces also need to get better at approvals, as many of the projects are entirely in their physical jurisdictions, he said, and there's also challenges with even approved projects not drawing enough support from Canadian companies to get them built.

"It's actually a lot like what you write about the military," he told me. "A government can commit to building a destroyer that won't be ready for 10 or 20 years, even though they don't know what the world will be like by the time it's ready. Governments can do that. Private capital doesn't like to do that." He added that one of the interesting problems we have is that the people who might want to see more sustained funding on defence over the long-term probably wouldn't want to see the kind of government industrial policy that would be required to get energy projects built over the long term. He’s right about that, I suspect.

He gave me a lot to mull over, and I'll probably pester him in the new year for a longer talk about it. But for our purposes here, I asked him if we'd made any progress on the energy front in 14 months, and, if anything, it's worse.

Super. So how about minerals?

My next call was to an expert in the Canadian mining industry. They are about to start a new job in that sector, and didn't want to be identified by name or institution because they weren't yet clear on the media policies. But they were willing to speak with me extremely candidly on background, and were basically as depressing as Leach.

"I think the government, after Russia invaded Ukraine, was under enormous pressure from our allies to do something," they said. "Canada is sitting on huge reserves of what the allies need to both equip their militaries and also sustain their economies. But I haven't seen anything on this front over the last 14 months."

That doesn't mean there hasn't been activity, they noted. "The government has been very focused on electric vehicles and battery production. But that's the stuff that's politically convenient for them. It aligns with their other values. They now need to get involved in speeding up permits for mines. What my industry is trying to tell them is, these factories aren't a case of 'build it and they will come.' You can't operate these factories unless you can also supply them with the raw materials, the critical minerals, to function. And that's what we need to get doing in Canada."

"This stuff is complex," they said. "The feds aren't being deliberately obstructionist. But the layers of red tape exist. We need to start from there. We need the feds to look at the process and say, what is actually needed to be socially and environmentally responsible, and what can we get rid of? Other countries are good at this. Australia does it well. We need to wake up on the policy side. We need to permit the mines, and we need to permit them in countries that are responsible. Canada has to be part of that."

But anything over the last 14 months that suggested to them that we were on it? Outside of EVs and batteries?

Nah.

So. Here we are. Fourteen months ago, Freeland went to Washington and told the world what the democracies, and her government, must do. More than a year and a totally new war later, our military isn’t meaningfully more capable, we aren’t trying to get more energy to our allies and we aren’t trying to get more mines built, either. I wasn’t expecting much to have been accomplished — I am a realist about how long things take — but I would have settled for signs that we were even trying. Outside of a few military purchases we needed to make anyway and should have made years ago, I’ve got nothing for you.

My contact in the mining sector maybe said it best: the problem isn’t that Freeland’s government is actively obstructionist. They aren’t. And it isn’t that they don’t get that we’ve got a big problem, either — Freeland is clearly one of the most important players in the government, and her speech makes it clear enough that she understands what the problem is, for Canada and the West. “Bloody history,” as she called it in her speech, is back.

The failure isn’t in malice or ignorance, in other words. It’s further downstream the process than that: we know that we must do things, and we even have some good ideas on what things to do, but we … don’t. Or can’t.

I’d love to wrap this all up with a brilliant insight that makes the reason why so clear, so obvious. I can’t. I don’t know what the problem is. It seems to me, though, that it’s one of two things: either we don’t mean the things we say, or we don’t think we have to do anything else after we say them.

Correction: I mangled the transcription of my mining expert’s quote — they had, rightly, said that Russia invaded Ukraine; a combo of the AI transcription tool and my sleep-deprived brain somehow turned that into “Russia was invaded by Ukraine,” which is, obviously, totally the reverse of what happened. Deeply regret the error.

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