Rethinking the 1971 White Paper and Trudeau's Impact on Canadian Defense Policy

Abstract

Introduction The accession of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1968 as prime minister of Canada, a post that he would hold for almost sixteen years, save nine months in opposition, began with the new leader explicitly exerting control over defense policy. Trudeau questioned the traditional premises of Pearsonian internationalism, particularly the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and specifically intended to redefine Canada's military commitments in the name of peace and the new global realities (McCall and Clarkson 1994, 335). At first, it appeared that he was able to change Canada's defense priorities unilaterally and was reflected in his government's 1969 NATO decision and 1971 defense white paper. Yet, for all the furor of anticipation generated by the defense white paper at the time, rooted as it was in Trudeau's foreign policy paper released a year earlier (Canada, Department of External Affairs 1970), the prime minister did not subsequently make the kind of impact on Canada's defense policy that we might have anticipated from the kind of influence that he apparently had on the 1971 paper. The reasons for are various. Granatstein and Bothwell (1990) compellingly argue that Trudeau not only lost interest in defense and foreign policy matters but, explicitly, he may well have gained understanding of military issues. Because Trudeau did not have a defense plan nor, more importantly, did he have adequate knowledge or expertise, his impact on defense policy waxed, and then waned, as he learned about the intricacies of Canadian defense matters. According to Granatstein and Bothwell (1990, 378), Trudeau to office mistrustful of NATO and not a little ignorant of the arguments for and against the alliance. Trudeau's lack of knowledge is important for understanding the resurgence of NATO in his government's thinking because, as interestingly put by Granatstein and Bothwell, the prime minister had to discover that even a good social democrat, like Germany's Helmut Schmidt, found value in military commitments. Von Riekhoff (1978, 276) makes a similar sort of assessment, arguing that Trudeau greatly valued the experience and that this explains certain shifts in [the prime minister's] foreign policy orientation. Trudeau, after all, was an intellectual who understood and valued the pursuit of knowledge. The prime minister's ignorance of the consequences of his defense decisions was offset by his capacity to learn and change his mind. This was clearly apparent when Western Europe's initial resistance to Canada's trade overtures came up. This resistance was traced, in part, to the disapproval of European allies, particularly West Germany, of the Canadian government's 1969 troop reduction. The Trudeau government responded by reaffirming Canada's NATO commitment. (1) It seems, then, that by examining Trudeau's beliefs through the years, we can account for the shifts in Canada's defense priorities. However, by tracing shifts in Canada's defense priorities primarily to Trudeau's learning experiences, do we not assume too much about Trudeau's capacity to influence defense policy? A central debate historically in the study of Canadian defense policy been whether individual policymakers exercise any choice in making defense decisions because of the constraints placed on the Canadian state by the international system. Given, at the time, the enormity of the Soviet threat relative to Canadian military capabilities, Trudeau's initial NATO decision and his emphasis on national sovereignty protection must be placed within the larger context of Canada's security policy. As Middlemiss and Sokolsky (1989, 213) have pointed out, Canada, by allying itself in NATO and the North American Air (later Aerospace) Defense command (NORAD), has already made its strategic In that way, as they assert, choices in Canadian defense policy would only be evident in posture and procurement decisions. …