PHOTO: DND

General Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff, will have to steer the implementation of the new defence policy.

On April 19, the government at long last issued its International Policy Statement. No matter what fate may befall this minority government in the months ahead, this exercise in policy generation has set a new and high standard that future governments may be hard pressed to match.

The International Policy Statement consisted of five related documents. There was a capstone document issued over Prime Minister Paul Martin’s signature and four sub-documents covering trade, aid, defence and foreign policy.

Yes, it took somewhat longer for these policy statements to emerge than Martin originally intended, but then the complexity of the exercise—trying to coordinate policy planning across four departments and the Prime Minister’s Office—with all that entailed, could not have been easy. It is an open secret, for example, that General Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, burned the midnight oil over Christmas doing a major revision of an existing defence document that neither he, nor Defence Minister Bill Graham, thought it was even close to the mark.

This is the first time ever that a government has attempted to coordinate an overall foreign policy strategy based on the simple notion that Canadian well-being, pride and interests are directly linked to Canada’s role in the world. At the same time, there is strong acknowledgment throughout the five papers that Canada’s most important foreign interest by far is the maintenance of a strong relationship to the United States. In this sense the policy statements are a clean break with the anti-American undertone that marked so much of former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s foreign policy.

The Defence Review is the clearest of the four departmental pieces and in many ways the most revolutionary. It affirms the army’s “transformation” from a Cold War remnant to a lighter, more agile, but still highly lethal force that Michael Jeffery initiated when he was chief of the Land Staff. It draws in both the navy and the air force to the process. It focuses tightly on the Canadian Forces’ core two-fold mission: the defence of the northern half of North America at home; to act as an instrument of Canadian foreign policy abroad.

There is a refreshing hard-headed realism to the defence paper. It speaks strongly of the need to maintain combat capability, though over a narrower range of options than was the case before.

It boldly, and rightly, declares that a major war involving heavy combat is not likely any time soon and that a key role that the Canadian Forces can and ought to play in maintaining global order is to help failed or failing states regain stability.

The paper asserts that most future missions for the Canadian Forces will likely take place within easy reach of coastlines and outlines a change in the navy’s role towards more littoral tasks.

It speaks of the Canadian Forces as a tool of Canadian diplomacy and points out that the CF will occasionally need to use lethal force in achieving its mission goals. It lays out a blueprint for the use of the Canadian military in ways that can be mission-leading in coalition operations but even if not, will always generate credit for Canada in the international arena. It revives the true Pearsonian notion that a high Canadian profile in select military operations is a key to maintaining Canadian influence in the world.

Still, there are problems and unanswered questions within the paper.

The paper advocates assured lift capability for the lighter, more agile, Canadian Forces but does not spell out what that lift capability might be or how it will be attained. There is a strong endorsement of the North American Aerospace Defence Command, but no indication of how sea and land operations might be integrated into that organization. One of the largest holes in the defence policy statement is procurement. There is nothing in the paper that proposes the solution of the procurement mess even though no plan for a transformed Canadian Forces will work if the new kit takes too long to acquire, is too expensive, or turns out to be second class.

Canada’s military procurement policies are little short of insane. They simply must be fixed.

So must the entire recruitment and training system that has evolved since the original unification. It doesn’t work either and everybody knows it, but so far no one has proposed a workable fix.

The largest problem with the defence paper, however, is that it clearly advocates deployments that in some cases may be for extended periods. That thought no doubt flows from the government’s oft-stated intention to stay in Afghanistan for a while yet.

There is a serious contradiction here. On the one hand the government proposes to build a light-medium weight, agile CF, to fight in littoral regions, and to be rapidly deployable wherever the national interest may dictate. On the other hand it wants to bog that military down in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. It’s like honing a sharp rapier only to use it to clear hectares of jungle undergrowth.

At the end of the day, this is a surprisingly hard-headed and realistic defence statement to have come from a Liberal government. Whatever the government’s fate, the defence policy issued on April 19 ought to form the basis for Canadian defence policy for some time to come, no matter which of the two major national parties ends up in government.