by David J. Bercuson

Prime Minister Paul Martin (left) will have to deal with NDP Leader Jack Layton (centre) now that he finds his government in a minority situation. He has lost an ally in David Pratt (right) who was the minister of defence before losing his seat in the election.

A column written six times a year can go stale before it is read. This piece is being composed less than a week after the federal general election of June 28, 2004. From the short perspective of just six days, the most significant outcome of the election for the Canadian defence picture seems to be “Martin plus Layton minus Pratt equals Canadian Disarmament.”

That is certainly one gloomy scenario that has been mooted in the defence community since the emergence of the Liberal minority government under Paul Martin. Although defence was raised by both major national parties in this election, the Liberal defence platform was, to be kind, somewhat unclear and ambiguous. Almost certainly in response to the clear Conservative defence proposals mooted by Stephen Harper of raising defence expenditure to two per cent of the Gross Domestic Product over the next five years or so and eventually increasing the Canadian Forces to 80,000, the Liberals reaffirmed the promises they had made before the election of new rescue aircraft and Maritime helicopters for the air force and three new joint support ships for the navy.

Martin also promised to add a new brigade to the army—some 5,000 troops he claimed—but insisted that the new formation would be created for “nation building,” whatever that is but presumably not for actually fighting. This was, to say the least, confusing because Martin seemed to be making a bid to increase the army’s deployable assets while at the same time hinting that the new brigade would consist not of actual soldiers, trained and equipped for combat if necessary, but of civil affairs officers, medics, supply technicians, and such like.

Since the latter notion is simply absurd, there are only two possible explanations: Either the Liberals could not utter the word “war” during a Canadian election for fear of alienating the anti-American left in Canada while struggling with the New Democratic Party for votes, and thus knowingly obfuscated, or the whole idea of army expansion was simply Liberal election hot air. In either case, truth was an obvious casualty.

But the Liberal election promises to strengthen the Canadian military came before Martin lost his majority and before the NDP emerged as his natural partner in governance.

In the final four weeks of the campaign a desperate Paul Martin seemed to swear off any notion of a missile defence agreement with the United States, attacked the Harper defence proposals as an effort to build a Cold-War-era military at the expense of the sick and the poor, and ridiculed Harper’s “aircraft carriers” i.e., the very ships that he, Martin, had promised the navy at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown before the election and which Harper had merely endorsed.

To make matters worse, Defence Minister David Pratt lost his seat. The most knowledgeable minister of National Defence and the strongest in his support of the military in perhaps 30 years was retired by his voters while his parliamentary secretary for reserve affairs, Quebec MP David Price, was also defeated.

During the election, Pratt narrowly averted a major Grit disaster when news leaked that an order was to be issued by Treasury Board on the first Friday of the campaign to freeze army reserve recruitment across Canada. That was in the face of the fall 2000 government promise to eventually build the militia in three stages to 18,500. Someone at Treasury Board could not seem to figure out whether the pre-election Martin-announced freeze on federal hiring also applied to reserve recruiting. It didn’t, but Pratt had to intervene quickly in the campaign—behind closed doors—to make that clear.

Despite the election, however, Martin has to face a number of unshakable realities.

First: the Americans will insist on a clear answer from Canada on missile defence sooner rather than later no matter what the outcome of the US presidential election. John Kerry won’t be any less insistent on missile defence than George W. Bush has been.

Second: Canada’s military is now too small and overstretched to make any significant impact either in the war to defend the west against the Islamic extremists or in maintaining international stability in places such as Africa or the Caribbean. Our allies are getting pretty fed up with Canadians building Cadillac welfare systems with the largesse this nation reaps from a global system it refuses to help defend.

Third: it is only a matter of time before the Canadian Forces suffer a significant military disaster caused either by equipment malfunction or enemy action. Canadians have been extremely lucky so far. But luck may not hold. If it doesn’t it could conceivably cause the downfall of the minority government and force the Liberals to run in a national election defending their deplorable defence record. This, they most certainly won’t look forward to.

So far the defence community has seen two Paul Martins: the pre-election man who declared his intention to rebuild Canada’s place in the world by, among other things, rejuvenating the military, and the campaign-trail Martin who tried to outpacify the most pacifist element of the New Democrats. If the former emerges over the next few months, he can count on the support of Harper’s 99 seats. If the latter, this nation might indeed be the first modern country to unilaterally disarm.