Canada the Great Peacekeeper?

The Canadian military is often the butt of many jokes-and that’s just from Canada’s citizens. But it has not always been this way. In the 20th century 1.7 million Canadians served in the armed forces and 114,000 fell in battle. At one battle in World War I, Vimy Ridge, Canada defined itself and announced to the world that we were a major force. So there is a long history of Canadian involvement in the world. But today the military is subject to political posturing over how much to cut from its budget and Canada’s role in the world is shrinking quickly.

When our role in military affairs became somewhat marginalized after WWII Canada turned to more ‘soft’ enterprises like peacekeeping. Since the advent of peacekeeping, Canadian participation in such ventures has been a source of national pride. From this the foreign policy pursued by Canada evolved into the notion of human security and Canada’s role as a middle power.

Former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy defines Human Security by stating that it, ”requires that people’s basic needs are met, but there is also recognition of the fact that sustained economic growth, respect for human rights and basic freedoms, the primacy of the rule of law, good government, sustainable development, and equality are just as important for world peace as arms control and disarmament.”

It is certainly a departure from traditional notions of security and sounds very costly too-it is basically a pipe dream. To think that human nature has been changed so much and that war is longer a reality is naive.

Foreign policy and defence are explicitly linked. Without some sort of capability to project force the ability to realize long-term foreign policy objectives, especially murky objectives of human security, will be difficult.

Earlier this year it was announced that the Canadian Air Force would mothball nearly 50 per cent of its air fleet. According to Sunil Ram, who served in the Canadian forces from 1980-1999 and who is now professor at Virginia’s American Military University, “these cuts to the air force demonstrate that the CF (Canadian Forces) remains underfunded, undermanned, underequipped, underpaid, and worst of all, badly led.”

In NATO, only Luxembourg spends less on the military than Canada. The worst part of what money Canada does spend is that it pays for a very large bureaucracy. The ‘crystal palace’ (The National Defence headquarters) houses more than 5, 600 uniformed personnel representing $350-million a year in salaries and almost 10 per cent of the total strength of the regular CF.

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