by David J. Bercuson
The decision of Jean Chrétien’s government to spurn even a hint of Canadian participation in the recent United States-led war could have far reaching operational implications for the Canadian military.

From the end of World War II until 1994 every Canadian defence white paper restated the three principal missions of Canada’s military forces. They were to defend Canada, to help the United States defend North America, and to augment multilateral military efforts to maintain or enforce international peace and stability.

The last of those aims brought with it the implication that the Canadian military might, at some point, find itself fighting a war alongside coalition partners. In the words of the 1994 White Paper, the Canadian Forces would prepare itself to “fight alongside the best against the best.” Despite the decade of budget starvation that followed the 1994 White Paper, the Canadian Forces have at least tried to maintain that objective. In the future, they may no longer be able to, in fact, they may not need to.

Canada’s refusal to join the Iraq war prompts a fundamental question. Will any future Canadian government ever sanction Canadian participation in a real shooting war no matter how much that war may serve Canadian national interests?

Consider where Canada’s national interests lay last March when the United States-led coalition launched military action against the Saddam Hussein regime. Leaving aside the crimes that regime committed against its own people, it posed a major strategic threat to the region. The stability of that region is surely a Canadian national interest. And if that was not reason enough for some Canadian participation, however token, Canada’s chief foreign interest will always be its relations with the United States and that by itself ought to have been enough not to reject outright any idea of any share in the war.

As an absolute minimum, for example, Ottawa might have formally placed the Canadian naval vessels operating in the Persian Gulf at the disposal of the coalition for the duration of the war. Such an action would only have formalized the working naval relationship that existed anyway, and which in fact continued to exist throughout the war, despite Ottawa’s claims to the contrary.

Canada doesn’t always have to follow the United States into its military campaigns. But Canada must always exercise its independence with good sense because the fate of Canadian defence is so integral to the relationship between the two nations and to the closeness of the two nations’ militaries.

But the Chrétien government did not simply stand aside from the war, it visibly aligned itself with France, Germany, and Russia, claiming that the very fate of multilateralism was at stake if the United Nations Security Council was bypassed, and that very notion of using military power to force regime change is, in principle, un-Canadian. Both claims are highly contentious. In fact, every factor the government cited as its reason for staying out of the 2003 war against the Saddam regime was equally applicable to the March 1999 air war against the Slobodan Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia, a war Canada took an active role in.

Is it possible, then, that after the 1999 air war, the current prime minister took the very notion of Canadian participation in any war off the national agenda? If that is so, it remains for those Canadians who understand how dangerous that idea is both to Canadian interests and to Canadian pride to disabuse the new prime minister of any such notion.

For one thing such a position invites attacks upon our national sovereignty by any element–governmental, criminal, or terrorist–which wants to do us or our neighbours harm through the unauthorized or illegal use of our lands, our resources, or our people.

For another, it ignores the reality that Canadian defence is now so thoroughly tied to the United States military that anything which threatens that tie endangers the viability of Canada’s forces.

It is virtually inconceivable that Canada’s military will ever again function in an offshore operation without the help of the United States military whether that help be logistical or operational. The Unites States military so dominates the development of military technology and the deployment of strategic sea and air lift in the world today, that at a minimum Canada’s military will need the Americans simply to get anywhere. And when they do get there, they will depend almost entirely on American-based information networks to be the eyes and ears of our land, sea and air forces.

The Canadian navy prides itself on being one of the very few modern navies in the world whose ships are virtually interoperable with those of the United States Navy. That didn’t happen by accident. It took hundreds of millions of dollars and almost a decade of intense training and operations alongside the Americans to achieve.

The upside for our navy is that it is completely up-to-date in the tasks it has chosen to specialize in. The downside is that if the Americans cut the navy off, Canada’s ships would be forced to rely on their own data collection abilities, which are severely limited without the aerial reconnaissance and satellite feeds that the U.S. Navy-based systems provide.

The same will be true for the air force’s CF-18s that are now undergoing extensive avionics and airframe upgrades. In future they will rely heavily on information fed to them by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and satellites; if they lose the capability to access that information, they will have to fly alone or stay at home.

The United States Army is developing the same sort of network-based information systems that it will use both within its land forces and to share data with its air and naval forces. If the Canadian army cannot share that data, it will endanger its own soldiers more than those of any potential enemy.

Canada’s military relies heavily on U.S.-based technologies, or will soon do so. That is a reality–and a national interest–no sensible Canadian government can ever again ignore.