Canada at the defence crossroads: The challenges of thinking long-term

Witnessing the ongoing public debate about fighter jets and submarines this fall has felt a lot like watching people argue over baseball, hockey or some other team sport.

Naturally, it has been particularly uncompromising online where the characteristics and quirks of each aircraft and boat have been analyzed to the nth degree with the kind of fan worship usually reserved for pro franchises.

Those who love the F-35, love it a lot. The same can be said for the Gripen. The mania is dialled back somewhat in the debate over whether to choose the South Korean KS-III submarine or Germany’s Type 12CD, but it’s still present.

Lost in all of the noise surrounding the minutia — as well as the debate around jobs and economic benefits — have been some fundamental questions of national security and industrial policy that the federal government has been unwilling or unable to answer to this point.

The two most pertinent questions facing the country, which is about to dump $81.8 billion into rebuilding the military and the defence industrial base, can be distilled to this: What precisely do we expect the Canadian military to do in this new arguably more dangerous world? And what are the key pieces of military hardware that should be built at home as a guarantee of our sovereignty?

The federal government would argue that it addresses the first question in its Trudeau-era defence policy (Our North, Strong and Free) and the second one will be answered in its long-awaited defence industrial strategy, due sometime in the next few weeks.

But this is Ottawa, which — over the last two decades — has been a wasteland of pretty policies with good intentions that have struggled to become reality because of an absence of political will, money or both. It has been particularly thus in the realm of defence since the end of the Cold War where successive federal governments sought to balance their budgets using the largest single discretionary line item in the federal balance sheet: the Department of National Defence.

Rarely have the policy debates started from the strategic perspective of where is Canada's place in the world? What do we want to do? What do we need to safeguard our sovereignty? And what do we need to do in order to do that?

There was a flash of that thinking in the Trudeau government’s 2017 return to peacekeeping plan, which — with the exception of one mission to Mali — withered and died a quiet death for the want of both political and fiscal support. 

Wesley Wark, one the country’s leading experts on national security, said there has been an absence of long-term strategic thinking at the federal level and many in the defence and foreign policy community are still mired in the fiscal and political limitations of the post-Cold War era, which is now inarguably over. 

“I don't think people have really thought about some of the breadth and latitude of choice that has opened up,” said Wark.

“What they have, of course, are many, many shopping lists, whether it's army shopping lists, navy shopping lists, space shopping lists, air force shopping lists.”

In the broader sense, the notion that we can do big things, he said, he’s “not sure they've quite grasped it.”

Wrapping our heads around what’s needed to properly secure and defend the Arctic, Wark said, will be an excellent starting point for institutions that have been inwardly focused for the last several years.