Who Killed The Canadian Military [Paperback]

Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed the Canadian Military? is more than a history of the decline and rustout of a military that as late as 1966 boasted 3,826 aircraft (including cutting-edge Sea King helicopters) as opposed to today’s 328 aircraft-including those same Sea Kings and CF-18 fighters whose avionics are a generation out of date; the same can be said of the army and navy. Granatstein’s book is a convincing analysis of Canada’s embrace of a delusional foreign policy that equates knee jerk anti-Americanism with sovereignty and forgets that in a Hobbesian world of international relations, “power still comes primarily from the barrel of a gun” and not from Steven Lewis’s speeches about Canadian goodwill, tolerance or humanitarianism.
Canadian foreign policy went awry, Granatstein believes, in 1957 when Mike Pearson won the Nobel Prize for cobbling together the UN peacekeeping mission that ended the Suez crises. It’s not that Pearson didn’t deserve it. Rather, it’s that having won it, Canadians almost at once changed their view of the country’s military. Just 12 years earlier, we had fielded an armed forces of more than a million men and women, fully 10% of the population, that fought in Sicily, Italy, France and liberated the Low Countries. (Putting aside the very few conscripts sent to fight in Europe at the end of the war, ours was the only completely volunteer armed forces in battle.) In 1955, the army alone totalled 50,000 (as compared to 54, 000 in all three forces today) and planes flew off HMCS Magnificent.
At a stroke, all this (and Vimy too) was forgotten and the myth of the nice Canadian peacekeeper was born. Pearson saw peacekeeping through the prism of the Cold War. Since we had never been an imperial power, our troops could be inserted into Suez, the Belgian Congo, Cyprus, where in addition to monitoring lines of control, our very presence kept the Soviets out. Publically, however, Canada assumed the role of ‘honest broker,’ which morphed into a wannabe neutral.
International “do-goodism” soon became outright Anti-Americanism. After defending Diefenbaker’s cancellation of the Avro Arrow, Granatstein shows how Dief made anti-Americanism a staple of Canadian politics. Dief did more than dismiss the evidence John Kennedy’s envoy brought to Ottawa to prove that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba. He stood up in Parliament and said that the UN should investigate the issue-and this with Soviet freighters steaming for Cuba.
Dief lost the next election to Pearson’s Liberals. But, as Granatstein underscores, Dief’s anti-Americanism helped him hold Pearson to a minority government, and by virtue of this “spread the infection [of Anti-Americanism] deep into the bone of the Liberal Party”-where, as evidenced by MP Carolyn Parrish’s famous “I hate those bastards” comment before the Iraq War, it flourishes still.
Granatstein’s critics will object that by refusing to say “Ready, Aye, Ready” to the Americans, Diefenbaker and later Trudeau and more recently Chretien augmented Canadian sovereignty. Rhetorically, that’s so: “‘Sovereignty’ was the first defence buzzword in Trudeau’s time.”
However, in the real world of international relations, argues this military historian, sovereignty comes from having a seat at the table-and the coin that buys that seat is the military assets you bring. Canada’s Second World War military reputation and her well-balanced forces gave our diplomats enough weight to help nudge the United States into NATO in 1949, which gave Canada access to secret US intelligence. Eight years later, our air force was credible enough to convince the Americans to enter NORAD and to make a Canadian second in command. Today we have few assets to bring to the table, where, according to Granatstein, all we can do is hear what the Americans have decided about continental defence.
Even peacekeeping has become more rhetorical than real. Ottawa may be the only city with a Peace Keeping monument, but internationally Canada now ranks 34th in the provision of troops (with fewer than 20,000 men and women), behind such international powerhouses as Bangladesh and Fiji. Nor has our government been honest about what peacekeeping has become. In 1999, Chrétien equated peacekeeping with Boy Scouting. It never was-though in its early years troops weren’t inserted until both sides had agreed to stop shooting. No such agreements were obtained in Rwanda, Somalia or the former Yugoslavia. By 1993, the Department of National Defence had grown so allergic to the idea of a military that “kill[s] people and blow[s] things up” that it suppressed news of the battle of Medak Pocket, during which, without suffering casualties to itself, the second battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry killed 27 and wounded 130 other heavily armed Croatians bent on “ethnic cleansing.”
Two generations of under funding-which has left the armed forces so badly equipped that ships despatched to the Persian Gulf in 2002 were outfitted with anti-aircraft guns borrowed from museums-is bad enough. Sadly, this has been accompanied by policies that have undermined the military’s esprit de corps. Unifying postal and intelligence services made sense. What in 1967 Defence Minister Paul Hellyer didn’t understand was that the “buttons and bows” he disparaged symbolized something vitally important for sailors, soldiers and air men and women who identified with the traditions of their squadrons, corps, regiments or units. Next came Trudeau’s barely disguised view that “generals and their soldiers were brutes and dolts.” Mulroney failed to deliver on promises of more money and men-and was unable to say “No” to any UN request for troops, thus creating the unprecedented peace time situation of soldiers deployed for as many as six months a year.
More recently, there’s been the impact of the Charter on military policy. Granatstein is at pains to argue that he supports inclusion of women in all roles in which they are physically suited, such as fighter pilot. But, he argues, “few women can lug heavy machine-guns and their belts of ammunition across country and fight enemy infantry.” A 19-year-old female must meet the same physical requirements set for a 45-year-old male, a situation that Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente suggested “is okay, so long as the enemy troops are all 45-year-old men.” Equally absurd is the use of quotas to raise the number of visible minorities in the Forces. First, he argues, there is no place for race-based thinking in recruitment. Second, the claim that visible minorities are under-represented in the Forces fails to take into account the fact that the vast majority of visible minorities live in major cities-population pools which produce a very small percentage of the men and women in the Forces. And thirdly, a goodly proportion of recent immigrants to Canada came from countries where the military was something to be feared. Quotas backed up by Charter arguments may be legal, but they reveal that the government views the army as a “social acculturation agency” and not as a tool that exists to project the state’s power.
No doubt many on the left will view Granatstein’s proposal that we increase defence spending from 1.1% to 2.5% of our GDP as proof that he’s Donald Rumsfeld in mukluks. He’s not. Three point two percent of the American GDP goes to the Pentagon.
Granatstein’s proposal is large, but the need is great. The Army requires more than a billion dollars just to get its buildings back into shape; hundreds of millions are needed to clean up environmental hot spots on firing ranges. And jeeps, tanks and helicopters, and a major support ship; and replacements for rusted out destroyers and fast aging fighters; and tens of thousands of new soldiers, sailors, aviators and militia men and women-all are needed. It’s not a choice between guns and the butter of health care and culture and pensions, Granatstein argues; we can afford both. Rather, he rightly claims, it’s the choice of having a military that can defend the country and count with our allies or accepting the ultimate in colonialism-letting the Americans alone defend North America, the largest part of which is our Dominion.
Nathan Greenfield (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

THE THREAT OF INTERNATIONAL—and even domestic—terrorism is not disappearing any time soon. It’s clear that our military has a key role to play around the world. So what has happened to Canada’s proud military tradition? demands Granatstein. With out-of-date, unsafe equipment and often ill-prepared personnel, we rank 34th among nations in the provision of UN peacekeeping troops, and the U.S. is seriously re-evaluating our ability to defend our half of North America against terrorism.
    For this sorry state Granatstein blames a series of inefficient governments since the Second World War and a nation that has allowed the military’s deterioration to continue unchecked. With an impassioned argument for a well-trained, well-funded military, and an updated preface to reflect events of the past year, Who Killed the Canadian Military? is already becoming a touchstone book for many Canadians, much like Granatstein’s last bestseller, Who Killed Canadian History?