Who Killed the Canadian Military?

Abstract

WHO KILLED THE CANADIAN MILITARY? J.L. Granatstein Toronto: HarperFlamingoCanada, 2004. 250pp, $24.95 cloth (ISBN 0-00-200675-8)What Canadian prime ministers say and then do is usually last W word in defence policy; their positions, therefore, deserve our close attention. Wilfrid Laurier, for instance, declared in 1910 that one did not need to take militia too seriously because Canada was well protected by Monroe doctrine. He set out for all times and all future prime ministers-although none since have dared to be as plainspoken as Laurier-the first fact of national defence in Canada: there is threat, and if there were one, Americans would save us. On eve of Second World War, Mackenzie King told Hitler, no person disliked that had to do with expenditures for defence purposes more than I did [and] members of my party in Canada all felt alike in this particular respect. Both Laurier and Mackenzie King were as good as their word and neglected Canada's defences with, in latter case, very serious consequences for Canada when war came in 1939.But is it unfair to fault Canadian prime ministers? After all, in early days of confederation, Canada was protected by British, the mother country, and after 1940 we adopted Americans as our new mother. Free riding on American eagle has been default position of every government since 1945, with notable exception of early years of Cold War. By 1967, Canada's armed forces and international status began to decay as prime ministers fell back on traditional assumptions and weak policies.In his indispensable new work, Who Killed Canadian Military?, Jack Granatstein castigates both prime ministers and a political class that dislikes everything that [has] to do with expenditures for defence purposes. He places Canadian prime ministers' choices in a political culture that disconnects the military and politicians and...the Canadian Forces and (1) at every important level, leading ultimately to failure of Canadians to oversee defence of citizens and nation. But Granatstein's purpose in this important study is not simply to lay blame, though blame he lays in abundance. His urgent quest is to discover how to remake Canadian military policy and restore Canadian Forces so they can once again play a role that serves nation, defends our country against terrorism, and makes our people proud (9). Unhappily, if political attitudes and low expectations that have conditioned defence policy through so much of Canada's history prevail in years ahead, chances that Canadian forces will be revived, that Canadians will be proud, and that Canada will become relevant in world seem very dim indeed.Canada's defence problem is not caused by nation's poverty, but by failure of prime ministers to properly address fundamentals of policy and to demand from parliament sufficient resources for national defence. The only possible way to overcome effects of years of political neglect, according to Granatstein, is to elect a prime minister who is determined to make case for defence policy reform and to push that policy through political opposition even within his or her own party. Granatstein drills this notion home by illustrating how our prime ministers, from Lester Pearson to Jean Chretien, have abandoned responsibility and worked to kill and bury Canadian forces.Context and consequences are central to Granatstein's search for perpetrators of this crime. Pearson, for instance, served Canada well and was by any measure a true and worthy Cold Warrior. Though he championed idea of collective security and need to build United Nations to promote it, Pearson conceded early on that it was only NATO that could create conditions necessary for UN to succeed.What Pearson unintentionally encouraged, however, was notion that peacekeeping under UN mandates was true path to global peace and security and natural occupation for Canadian forces. …