Will The Govt. Defend Canada?

[toms3]

Will the government defend Canada?
 
J.L. Granatstein  
National Post

Monday, September 09, 2002
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In the United States, observers agree, there is a clear sense of a nation at war. Not in Canada, however. Here, it's business as usual, with politicians gearing up for leadership races and medicare the only topic that stirs debate.

And yet Canada is at war and subject to terrorist attacks just as much as the United States. Indeed, every democratic, secular and pluralist nation is at risk of assault from fundamentalists, and countries such as Britain and Australia have changed their defence policies to take this into account. Not Canada. Here, the Department of National Defence is running a "defence update" with a sham public consultation. Here, the Finance Minister explicitly states that there will be no new money for defence in the next budget. Here, the Prime Minister and Paul Martin, his leading challenger, have absolutely no interest in the Canadian Forces.

This is a tragedy. Canada's military today has a nominal strength of 60,000 and a real strength 10% below that number. The Forces are short of pilots, doctors, sailors and infantry. The navy is on the verge of retiring its supply ships and its destroyers are ready for the knackers. The air force's fighters lack sophisticated electronics, its Sea King helicopters are held together with Band-aids and baling twine, and the nation cannot fly its forces around the world. The army has fine troops, but its brigades haven't trained together in more than a decade and only three battalion groups of our 11 train each year.

"So what?" you ask. "So what?" the government says. Canada once was a country that proudly felt it was a real player in the world. The nation put 1.1-million men and women into uniform in the Second World War -- out of a population of 11 million. It sent troops to Korea, helped found NATO and provided troops for European defence for more than 40 years and played a critical role in developing and fostering United Nations peacekeeping.

Today, however, our troops are out of NATO Europe. In defence spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, Canada spends 1.1% and ranks 17th in NATO. We have the world's 34th-largest population but its 56th-largest professional military. Again, so what?

Canadians may not think so, but the state of our defences matters to our friends and enemies. The Americans, deadly serious about homeland defence after 9/11, look on Canada as the freeloader nation, a people that prattles about sovereignty and offers nothing but anti-American rhetoric. The U.S. military's new Northern Command has Canada as part of its area of responsibility, and if Canada won't guarantee the inviolability of its territory, the United States will because it must. To NATO, Canada is a joke nation, a country with skilled soldiers and sailors but with equipment as obsolescent as that fielded by the Eastern European applicants for membership in the alliance. To terrorists and other enemies, Canada must be viewed as the easy entrance to the United States, the weak spot in America's defences.

Still, the government pretends everything is fine and that nothing need be done even though experienced officers and technicians are leaving the military in a steady stream. If there is no new money that stream will become a flood. But there is no need to undertake a full defence review, the government maintains, because the last White Paper of 1994 is still valid. But that White Paper, undertaken at a time of fiscal stringency, nonetheless called on the Canadian Forces to be able to fight with the best against the best. That claim is now beyond reach. If drastic action to restore the Canadian Forces is not taken at once, the Canadian military might as well fold its tents and disappear, leaving the country's defences in the hands of the RCMP Musical Ride.

The Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century, a non-partisan defence advocacy organization, believes this is absolutely unacceptable for a sovereign nation. The government refused to undertake a defence review, so CCS21 has produced The Peoples' Defence Review, issued today. Moderate and balanced, this review is available online at www.ccs21.org. Read it and, instead of weeping, demand that your government give you the Canadian Forces this nation must have.

 

[Knight]

Will the Government defend Canada????

defend what?
Lets first exactly define whats at stake here. Whats at stake here the most is the friendship with United States and the economic dependence on United States not a Terrorist threat to Canada.

If I tell anyone that "yesterday some Terrorist got caught trying to smuggle weapons into Canada from USA at Niagra".. ofcourse everyone will laugh, thinking its a joke. People call canada is a heaven for Terrorists but have their ever been any serious/credible threat to any Canadian landmarks?
Have Canadian embassies ever been attacked in Europe or Africa or Asia?

One might say Canada is safe becuase its USA neighbour.. ! hmm... Has any building in Europe been attacked that was not associated in anyway with USA or Isreal?

There are several western nations who share the same idea‘s as Canada and they are also not on US war bandwagon.

US and UK have done billions of dollars in Arms sales and rebuilding contracts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia since gulf war. The vested intrests of US and its objectives are far more greater then just of a mere Saddam scare.
If we look back at history.. should Canada have sent troops to Vietnam to help US against Veitcong?

The politics of Super Powers and Nations with Veto powers is a lot different then that of Cananda or Sweden or Denmark or Argentina. Countries like us are geared more towards defence unlike countries that have imperielistic designs and are on the hunt for Slave nations.

So if we are going to help US, its because we are helped economically by US by being a Trade Partner and we have a tradition of being friends and partners. The rest is just sympathy.

 

[bossi]

(well, actually, I thought this editorial was particularly good - I‘ll let you judge it yourselves):

Give the Forces what they need

The Gazette
Sunday, September 15, 2002

Some 80 per cent of Canadians believe, a new opinion poll suggests, that this country would have to rely on the United States to defend us if our country faced a military threat. Another 7 per cent refused to answer or professed not to know. The remaining 13 per cent of Canadians, we surmise, expect that any military threat would be coming from the Americans themselves, or perhaps Monaco.

The beauty of Canada‘s place in the world, geographically, is that since Gen. Isaac Brock‘s day, we have never faced a military threat in the sense of the poll question: no amphibious landings on Wreck Beach, no paratroops over St. John‘s, no U.S. armoured divisions in Spruce Meadows. We have never been burdened by the steady financial drain of a standing army, so essential to national survival for countries unlucky enough to find themselves in parts of the world where the maps need four colours. As long ago as 1927, Sen. Raoul Dandurand noted that Canadians live in "a fireproof house, far away from flammable materials."

Seduced by this perceived inflammability, we have forgotten that armed forces have other uses, too, and now we find ourselves virtually without any. Canada‘s strenuous and valorous contributions to Allied victory in two world wars have become, to many educators, a nasty little secret to hide from the kids, but at least Canadians have been proud of the country‘s half-century of peacekeeping. We‘ve always tried as a country to show the flag, at least, in campaigns such as the Gulf War. And we have always counted on the Canadian Forces to provide "aid to the civil power" in calamities such as the ice storm.

But we‘ve been starving our Forces for a long time now. This year‘s defence budget, $11 billion, is fully $1 billion less than in 1993. What other government department can say that?

Now, finally, the Forces are on the brink of collapse, in the words of Jack Granatstein, a military historian who is chairman of a Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century. This new lobby group hopes to convince the government to take our military seriously again.

It has a point. Defence policy adopted by the Chrétien government in 1994 calls for Forces robust enough to deploy a brigade of 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers for a short period, and keep a battalion group - about 1,000 soldiers - in the field indefinitely. But we couldn‘t keep even an 800-member battalion in Afghanistan for more than six months. The government, always miserly toward the Forces though free-spending elsewhere, has ignored its own policy.

Why? Mr. Granatstein has an answer: "For political purposes, the Liberals have decided that since they can‘t do anything about defence, why bother, especially since the Americans are doing it anyway," he said. "Funding the military doesn‘t win you elections. Besides, the prime minister is fundamentally anti-military."

All this is "inexplicable" and "unconscionable," the Granatstein group says. The government this week just shrugged off the criticism, as it has shrugged off similar criticisms from many other experts so often before. The result is that much of our equipment is falling apart, and morale can‘t be much better.

Perhaps the Canadian people have taken little notice of all this - we are an un-military people, if not "anti-military" - but our neighbours are paying attention. U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci has been pushing us to spend more on defence, and meanwhile, there are Canada-U.S. talks on stationing U.S. troops in Canada in certain circumstances. The details have been kept dark, but this initiative seems to be connected with a response to possible terrorism.

We don‘t understand what exactly U.S. troops would do to help us deal with terror, but we can‘t think of any scenarios we like. In one sense, there‘s nothing new about U.S. soldiers on our soil, but in the current context, it‘s enough to make you think. The Americans, concerned about continental security, reckon logically enough that somebody‘s got to defend Canada, and it‘s not the Canadians.

This idea seems to match the collective wisdom of the Canadian people: in time of peril, the Americans will defend us. But what an assault on our national self-respect! And what becomes of the idea of "Canadian sovereignty" when our own military has atrophied away? Wouldn‘t it be simpler and wiser to just find the money to give us the armed forces we need?