In The Line, Matt Gurney reacts to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unforced confession that Canada has been freeloading on US military protection for generations and yet is only now making the beginnings of moves to address it:
Rough transit routes to Canada’s Arctic from Esquimalt BC and Halifax NS
There is a fascinating if glum confession buried inside Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent announcement, given in the company of Canadian Armed Forces personnel in Yellowknife, of how Canada will spend $35 billion to build and upgrade existing military infrastructure. The major spending announcement was augmented by Carney’s promise to submit four northern road, electricity and port projects to the Major Projects Office for expedited (we hope) approval and completion.
The announcements are interesting, even if the bulk of the military spending was actually just re-announcing stuff Justin Trudeau had announced years ago. Nothing new there, alas. Even so, it was the phrasing of the PM’s remarks that jumped out at me. Striking a familiar tone, Carney said, “We will no longer rely on others to defend our Arctic security or to fuel our economy. We are taking full responsibility for defending our sovereignty.”
I like it! I’m glad we’re doing it.
What the hell were we waiting for? How did we ever get to a place where no longer relying on others to defend our security and fuel our economy became a decisive shift in policy worth highlighting in an announcement?
What was wrong with us?
This is not a column aimed at Carney. I’ve been dismayed and discouraged by a lack of progress on some key files so far, but I will grant that we won’t be able to truly judge this announcement for some time, and that he does at least seem more interested than other recent PMs in getting Canada’s military capability back to where it must be. So, for all the Carney fans out there, you can sheath your swords. I get it. I’ll keep watching and waiting, but my impatience is growing.
But I still think the broader question is still worth asking, even if we agree, for now, to leave Carney himself out of it. Why were we relying on others to defend our own territory? Or fuel our economy? Why were we not taking full responsibility for defending our sovereignty? How did that even happen?
There are some admitted historical factors here, including the fact that Canada was spun up as an independent state out of the British Empire, and obviously counted on the support of that empire for much of our early history. That set a tone, clearly. In more recent generations, there was also the obvious reality that the United States’s desire for continental security was always going to involve a lopsidedly large U.S. commitment, just due to the massive disparity between our populations and economies.
Let’s grant that at the outset. Our history and geography have conditioned us to view domestic defence as a collaborative effort where we are a junior partner even in our own territory — maybe not in a legal sense, but in practical one.
The point here isn’t to lament that Canada never had a fleet as large as the Royal Navy in the 1910s, nor an air force as large as the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s. We can all agree and understand that Canada’s contribution was always going to be more modest and given our massive landmass and air and sea approaches, Canadian defence was always going to be made much simpler with the cooperation of a friendly larger ally or benefactor.
But gosh, we really leaned into the helplessness, didn’t we?
Matt is happy that the PM seems more involved in taking Canadian territorial defence seriously, and there’s no dispute that this is a national concern that has been neglected for … well … decades, generations even. I’ve heard some attribute the withering of Canada’s defence establishment to the “peace dividend” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it actually began in 1968 with the first Trudeau era. We’re not going to be able to rectify six decades of neglect in a couple of years, no matter how many new programs and purchases are announced.
And not to be a Debbie Downer, but remember that the federal government has been addicted to the sugar high of making announcements and getting tongue-bathed by the tame media enough that the same project would get announced and re-announced for sometimes years before anything tangible resulted. The new Arctic defence announcements were, as Matt noted, already stated government policy before Carney entered politics. How many more dips in the PR bath will it take before anything real is implemented?
