by Thomas S. Axworthy

Canada’s most profound military tradition is to be continually and woefully unprepared for conflict while the men and women in our armed services acquit themselves quite admirably once wars occur. This combination of national failure in preparedness and individual success in soldiering is a kind of schizophrenia the country can no longer afford.

With weapons of mass destruction, terrorists can inflict horrific damage instantly, no longer giving us the option of months of frantic activity to make up for years of neglect. In the 21st century, Canada must either steel itself to do things very differently in the area of national security or at worst we will be responsible for putting citizens at risk or at best condemning Canada to foreign policy irrelevance.

Defence Minister John McCallum and Finance Minister John Manley should be congratulated for increasing the Department of National Defence’s base budget from $11.8 billion this year to $12.75 billion in the upcoming fiscal year. This new money, announced in the February budget, will allow the Canadian Forces to function more adequately as they can now purchase spare parts, put gasoline into our aircraft, hire specialists such as mechanics, and pay for deployments to the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. The Chief of Defence Staff, General Ray Hénault, told Canadians last July that the status quo at DND was “unsustainable”; after last week’s budget at least the defence department is no longer in danger of shutting down.

But before too many hosannas are sung, Canadians should realize that even after the increase the defence budget will only return to what it had been in 1993 and in the intervening 10 years the price of everything military has gone up. Last February’s increase in military spending was a system-maintenance budget to avert a system breakdown. When I first went to Ottawa in the mid-1960s, Paul Hellyer, defence minister in the Pearson government, promoted the radical change of unification to reduce duplication in order to ensure that at least 25 per cent of the defence budget was spent on equipment. Today we spend 10 per cent on equipment, the lowest amount in North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the equipment demands are staggering–new transport aircraft, new supply ships, new helicopters and the list goes on. We have been robbing the equipment budget to pay for operations. The latest increase will pay for a host of small procurement needs but the big-ticket items remain.

So the budget vis-a-vis national defence was a useful, much-needed addition to Canada’s defence readiness. But it was not a breakthrough in Canadian defence policymaking, and it is a breakthrough or a drastic shifting of priorities that we require.

Only once in the entire peacetime history of national defence did Ottawa respond to a crisis with sufficient resolve. After World War II, the Mackenzie King government demobilized our large military forces and radically reduced the size of the regular forces and the militia. During the war, more than a million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served. By 1947, the military was under 33,000. Neither the Cold War nor the creation of NATO in 1949 created any groundswell of opinion that military preparedness should be a major priority. But in June, 1950, North Korea attacked the Republic of Korea, the United States ordered American forces in Japan to intervene, and the Cold War became hot.

The start of the Korean War in June 1950 was the Sept. 11th of its era: it was a shock–a massive intelligence failure–and it seemed to be the augury of worse things to come. Having agreed to war in Korea by his allies might Stalin next plan war in Europe? After Korea things were never the same: Canada agreed to join the U.S. in a United Nation’s–sanctioned war to defend South Korea, both Canada and the U.S. agreed for the first time to send large armies to defend Europe in peacetime, and both countries hugely expanded their military forces.

While returning to Ottawa from King’s funeral in 1950, the cabinet of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent began to make defence peacetime decisions that would have astonished their old isolationist leader. A special brigade was raised for the Korean theatre; soon after another brigade and the No. 1 Air Division were sent to Europe and the size of the military more than doubled to 105,000. The defence budget more than tripled from $403 million in 1950-51 to $1.45 billion in 1951-52. In comparison, the February 2003 budget raised the DND budget by under eight per cent. From 1950-65, Canada mattered militarily.

Mattering militarily meant that, with the F-86 Sabres, the First Cdn. Air Div. provided the best aircraft to defend Europe, when the threat was highest; mattering militarily meant the commander of the British Army of the Rhine said in 1957 that Canada’s brigade was “the best fighting formation in the world.” Mattering militarily meant that General E.L.M. Burns, a Canadian, was chosen to head up the UN Emergency Force that ended the Suez Crisis of 1956, and mattering militarily had members of the Eisenhower administration in the U.S. praising Louis St. Laurent, CD Howe, Lester Pearson and the Canadian way of doing things rather than griping about a porous border. It is no coincidence that Pearsonian diplomacy, the high watermark of Canada’s influence in the world, was backed by significant Canadian military assets. Although it did not use the term, the government of Louis St. Laurent practised “muscular multilateralism,” a cooperative approach to world problems bent on using international organizations to the full, but with Canada punching above its weight in providing armed muscle as the sinews of the international organizations we were attempting to build.

What was done in 1950 can be done today. We have done it in other areas. The February budget committed Canada to doubling our spending on international development by 2010. It is right that we do so because economic assistance is also part of foreign policy capacity. But we need a similar commitment to national defence. We need a regular force of 85,000 that is well equipped, trained, and able to move by sea and air.

In 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian commanding the UN force in Rwanda, said that with a professional brigade of 5,000 soldiers he might have been able to save thousands from genocide. Canada could not respond because we did not have the capacity to do so. In 1956 when Pearson invented modern peacekeeping he knew the Canadian Forces could back up his initiative. Do we want to return to the Pearson era or are we content to shadow box?

The world needs multilateralism as much today as it did in 1956, but influence does not come cheaply. There is a world of disorder outside our borders that threatens us. Let us commit to turning that world of disorder into a zone of peace.

Editor’s note: Thomas S. Axworthy is an adjunct lecturer at Harvard University. He served as Principal Secretary to Pierre Trudeau from 1981-84. This text is from a speech he gave to the Conference of Defence Associations, Feb. 27, 2003.