by David J. Bercuson

Last August details began to emerge of some of the new Canada-United States arrangements that are being discussed by the two governments to aid each other in the event of catastrophes along, or near, the international boundary. Particulars are sketchy as of this writing, but essentially the two countries aim to establish procedures by which Canadian or U.S. military personnel can cross each other’s borders and operate inside each other’s countries in the event of either natural disaster or terrorist attack.

There has been an accord in place since 1957 which allows Canadian or U.S. military aircraft to operate in the airspace of the other country and that is the well known North American Aerospace Defence Agreement. But arrangements to allow U.S. ground forces or naval units to operate inside Canada or Canadian territorial waters would be unprecedented.

Still, these are unprecedented times and although Ottawa has gone to great lengths to put a positive spin on the discussions, there is no getting around the fact that Canada’s need for U.S. help is far, far, greater than vice versa and is in direct proportion to Canadian military weakness.

On strictly practical grounds there can be no question that such arrangements are needed. First, the Canadian military capacity to survey and patrol, let alone to guard, Canada’s boundaries has so diminished that it simply cannot be done unless the Canadian Forces concentrate on only the most important stretches of those boundaries, say near major populated areas. That, obviously, will always leave large stretches unguarded for most of the time. Second, if the Americans believe that the defence of the United States itself is now a major priority and that they can get little help from Canada in guarding their very large northern doorstep, they will do it anyway.

No Canadian should misunderstand the nature of the problem Canada is now facing. The Canadian approaches to the United States will be guarded. The only question is whether it will be guarded by us or by the U.S.

Canada faced this problem once before in its history, in the period from the end of World War II until missiles overtook manned bombers as the No. 1 Soviet threat to the United States sometime in the early 1970s. During that period, the Canadian government made a serious effort, at great expense, to build enough jet interceptors and to deploy them at airfields across Canada to make a serious contribution to a joint Canada-U.S. defence against the bomber threat. Canada deployed hundreds of first-line fighters in the 1950s and early 1960s, built the mid-Canada radar line–solely at Canadian expense–and provided thousands of air and ground personnel to maintain a ready reaction capacity.

When Canada joined Norad in 1957, Canada made a substantial contribution to that command. It was not token. In fact, the prime continental mission of the Royal Canadian Air Force in that first decade or so of the Cold War was to defend U.S. Strategic Air Command bombers based in Canada or in the northern U.S. in places like Minot in North Dakota. In doing so, they were protecting not only America’s nuclear retaliatory capacity, but the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s nuclear umbrella. It was a vital mission. Thus Canada’s role was far in excess of the roughly 10 per cent of Norad assets that Canada provides today. Canada’s greatest contribution to the air defence of North America now is that it allows U.S. fighters access to Canadian skies.

When missiles overtook manned bombers as the paramount threat to the U.S., the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau declared the first instalment of the peace dividend for Canada and began the long process of unilaterally dismantling the Canadian military. Canada’s NATO partners complained about Canada’s diminishing role abroad, but there seemed no good reason to worry about Canada’s shrinking ability to defend itself, or the U.S., at home because there seemed to be no threat. Suddenly that all changed last September. But in the year since, the Canadian government has moved not a single millimetre in the direction of boosting Canada’s overall military capacity.

None of these very practical considerations seems to bother the doomsday visions of those self-appointed guardians of Canada’s sovereignty who are already trying to warn Canadians that the sky will finally fall when U.S. troops first set foot on Canadian soil. Their not-very-well-thought-out argument is that cross-border troop movement agreements will add immeasurable dangers to those perils Canada already faces from the impending creation of the U.S. Northern Command or Northcom.

That is fear-mongering at its basest. If Norad-style arrangements for land and sea forces are not put into place before a crisis occurs, there will be no procedures to govern what will then be a necessary military response. Further, these fear-mongers surely know that by itself the creation of Northcom will no more undermine Canadian sovereignty than the creation of European Command undermined French or German sovereignty.

In fact, it is this very same group of so-called Canadian nationalists who so vehemently oppose any significant strengthening of the Canadian Forces. In effect their position is a neutralist one but without the hard thinking about military power that real neutralism entails. When Sweden asserted its neutrality during the Cold War, it also maintained one of the largest per-capita military budgets in Europe to back its neutrality up.

The single greatest threat to Canadian sovereignty in the post-Sept. 11 world stems from the extreme state of Canada’s military weakness. Canada has been left with a military too small and weak to defend itself or the approaches to North America in any significant way. And the lack of Canadian assets to deploy abroad in the war against terrorism has virtually eliminated our ability to affect the broad strategic decisions that will be made by the U.S. and others. There is today no glint of steel giving any muscle to our conduct of our foreign relations with the Americans or anyone else in the world.