by David J. Bercuson

The Sea King helicopter that crashed on the deck of HMCS Iroquois in late February is removed for inspection at Shearwater, N.S.

In his Feb. 18 budget speech Finance Minister John Manley announced a long- anticipated and significant infusion of cash into the Department of National Defence. Although observers differed over the long-term implications of the increase, most agreed that the government had basically committed itself to building approximately $2.4 billion on to the 2001-02 defence base budget in three annual steps of $800 million beginning in the 2002-03 fiscal year.

The budget increase was not unexpected. For one thing the government was under significant pressure from the United States to bail out a rapidly diminishing Canadian military capability. For another, a mountain of evidence of underfunding had accumulated since the late 1990s from institutions as diverse as the Conference of Defence Associations, the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs and the federal auditor general.

The case for a defence increase was so strong that even well known Canadian leftists such as Pierre Trudeau’s biographer Stephen Clarkson and NDP leadership hopeful Bill Blaikie were already reconciled to it.

The budget increase is certainly enough to pull the Canadian Forces out of the death dive they have been in since the deep cuts of the early 1990s. It is not nearly so significant as to reinvigorate the Canadian military generally, avoid the looming rust-out crisis that awaits the CF by the end of the current decade, or even to begin the first stages of the long-anticipated army transformation and restructure.

As well-known Liberal guru Tom Axworthy told the Conference of Defence Associations’ annual meeting in Ottawa a week after the budget: “Last week’s increase in military spending was a system-maintenance budget to avert a system breakdown…it was not a breakthrough in Canadian defence policy-making…and it is a breakthrough or a drastic shifting of priorities that we require.” Amen to that.

It is always difficult to read the tea leaves when trying to divine the foreign and defence policies of the Chrétien government; the budget increase is no exception. It signals that the current government is not deliberately trying to disarm the nation unilaterally, but it gives no indication what long-term future the government is planning for the Canadian Forces.

In fact, the current government has given no real indication since the 1994 White Paper that it has any idea what to do with the Canadian military over the long haul, other than to sustain it. Canada’s foreign and defence policies under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien have been a jumble of confusion, contradiction, and contrariness that have never really amounted to a coherent whole.

The prime minister, to his credit, has always understood the crucial importance of seeking entrée into international markets, but he has never linked Canadian economic well-being to a consistent and considered expansion of Canadian national interests within the larger global community. The 1994 Defence White Paper’s aims were commendable but the military was never given the resources to live up to the commitments made. At the same time Canada’s foreign aid budget shrank while the once powerful Department of External Affairs was divided up into weak satrapies, none of which had the intellectual power or the political capital to maintain a steady direction in the policy-making process.

There is no better evidence of that ad hoc approach than the announcement, made just six days prior to the Manley budget, that Canadian troops would be going back to Afghanistan in 2003 not to fight a war, but to take part in the United Nations stabilization force that basically props up the post-Taliban interim government in Kabul. This will be the most significant Canadian United Nations mission since the ignominious dissolution of the United Nations Protection Force for Croatia and Bosnia in 1996. It comes at a time when Canadian “blue helmet” peacekeeping operations have fallen to their lowest levels since Lester Pearson invented peacekeeping at the time of the 1956 Sinai/Suez crisis.

Does the new Canadian commitment to Afghanistan signal a resolve on the part of the Chrétien government to reinvigorate Canada’s commitment to United Nations multilateralism at precisely the moment that the United States’ military power seems to have rendered that multilateralism irrelevant? Not likely, because the UN is not a dependable horse to bet on. The UN in 2003 is fundamentally the same UN that proved so inadequate in Yugoslavia in 1993 or in Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, Sierra Leone and other major international crises of the 1990s. The UN will prove no more able to handle any real crisis, should one arise, in Kabul because it was never designed to wield significant international power. The five permanent members of the Security Council who might change that situation have no intention of doing so. Witness the fate of Under-Secretary General Lakhdar Brahimi’s committee recommendations, made to the Security Council in 1999, which would have substantially enhanced the UN’s ability to respond rapidly and with significant military force to major global crises. They gather dust in the UN secretary general’s office.

Canada’s commitment to Afghanistan resulted from a quick and dirty decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to duck out of any potential ground contribution to the war to disarm Saddam Hussein. No one yet knows what price Canadian troops may have to pay to have given the prime minister that rabbit hole to disappear into. Hopefully, not much.

Ordinarily all this would be cause for despair. A Canadian Forces going nowhere in a foreign policy vacuum is not a hopeful sign that Canada’s current leadership yet has any clue to how Canadian national interests are best served over the long run. But the precise point is that the current leadership has no long run anyway. The nation will soon have a new leader, and no matter who that leader is, he (or she) is bound–by default–to give more active definition of Canadian defence and foreign policy than Jean Chrétien ever could.

Only when that page is turned can the process begin to reinvigorate the nation’s foreign policy, and the Canadian military with it.