I have banged on and on and on, to the annoyance of some of my readers, about how Pierre Elliot Trudeau reshaped Canada, almost entirely, in my considered opinion, for the worse. I have singled out, frequently, his evident distaste for the Canadian military and his very real isolationism and reluctance to have armed forces, at all.
There is a lot of documentation about Pierre Trudeau and his views and attitudes, much of it laudatory, some of it critical. I make no secret of the fact that I assert that one Canadian prime minister (perhaps, in my opinion, Canada best-ever leader) the great Liberal Louis St. Laurent, gave Canada a coherent, principled, liberal, values-based grand strategy in the late 1940s and then, just 20 years later another Liberal, Pierre Trudeau, tore it all down, threw it all aside and imposed new, very illiberal, values on Canada ~ all because, I guess, he could not reconcile the facts that stared him in the face in the late 1940s with his own personal choice to have stood, firmly, on the wrong side of history in 1944 when he elected to continue to study (this time at Harvard) rather than to join in the fight to crush Hitler.
M. St. Laurent and M. Trudeau could not have been more different. Louis St. Laurent was an internationally respected lawyer, he was “a man of the world”, neither an anglophile, like Sir Wildred Laurier, nor an anglophobe like Trudeau, he was secure in being a Canadian. He came to politics reluctantly, as a duty, but he quickly became known to, respected by, and, indeed, often friends with Harry Truman, George Marshal, Dwight Eisenhower and Dean Acheson, with Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, Clement Atlee, Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and with Tage Erlander of Sweden, Jawaharlal Nehru and V.K. Krishna Menon in India, Sir Robert Menzies of Australia, Tunku Abdul Rahman in Malaysia and leaders, from the West, the East and the non-aligned states. Pierre Trudeau, on the other hand, was a small, very parochial man who did not, really, understand Canada, beyond French-speaking Québec. He became “famous” for opposing Maurice Duplessis ~ something, I have suggested, that would not be much beyond the intellectual capabilities of a somnolent house cat. He travelled the world but never seemed, to me, to have acquired the respect that was accorded to Louis St. Laurent or Mike Pearson … except, perhaps from Fidel Castro.
Ted Campbell, “Pierre Trudeau’s legacy”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-08-02.
August 6, 2023
QotD: Pierre Trudeau’s legacy
July 22, 2023
QotD: “Managing” your way to victory
There is nothing wrong with good, sound management and management theory and management science (and, yes, I believe there actually is a such a thing) have much to teach us all, including governments and the military, about how to get the most from one’s always limited resources, especially time. But, too often, in my opinion, management becomes an end in itself and process replaces critical thinking and analysis. When this happens in both the political/bureaucratic and in the military realms, as I believe it has in Canada (which has tended, since about 1970, to follow the USA almost slavishly) then I believe that our national defence is in peril.
It is common, amongst military people, to accept that there is a “master principle of war”: Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. That means that one MUST understand what one is trying to do and then focus all one’s efforts on getting that done. The corollary is that if you don’t know what you need to be doing then getting the results you want (need) is unlikely. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces lack good strategic direction because the Government of Canada, the Trudeau government, is unconcerned with anything past the next election. I also believe that the military leadership, lacking strategic direction, simply follows whatever new process seems to be popular in the Pentagon. Canadians, therefore, are not getting value for money from either the government they elected nor from the military forces for which they pay.
Ted Campbell, “Following the blind leader (3)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-05-21.
July 17, 2023
Canada has been one of the biggest freeloaders in NATO for more than 40 years
From the weekend Dispatch from the editors of The Line, some indication that even the American legacy media are tired of Canada’s generations-long peace dividend freeloading at the expense of our allies:
American media doesn’t often notice Canada, and as much as Canadians like to whinge about being ignored, the lack of interest in our affairs from south of the border is usually a good thing. If you’re looking for a rule of thumb here, it’s this: attention from the Americans is almost always negative.
A case in point this week was an editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, headlined “Canada is a military free-rider in NATO”. The subhed was “Ottawa still spends only a pathetic 1.38% of GDP on defense”. The editorial makes a number of points almost all of which will be familiar to readers of the Line, which are all variations of: Canada shirks its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, while engaging in relentless virtue signalling and moral preening, both domestically and to its allies. It treats national defence as social project, while doing little to nothing in the way of actually projecting the power that is needed to defend the values it purports to advance.
There are some absolutely killer lines in the editorial, beginning with the lede: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Lithuania this week for the annual NATO summit, but it’s too bad there wasn’t a junior table where he could sit.” A few paragraphs later: “Last week Ottawa put in its two cents against cluster munitions. But asking its citizens to meet their actual obligations to the cause of freedom is apparently too much to ask.” And then: “Nowadays Ottawa can be counted on to ‘fight’ for human rights, which is to say that it talks a lot about them.”
Again, for anyone paying attention here in Canada, these are not new arguments. But the editorial does add one twist at the end, suggesting that if Canada can’t be bothered keeping its NATO commitments, then perhaps it should be kicked out of the G7 and replaced by a country willing to play a leadership role. They suggest Poland as a possibility.
Reaction in Canada has been surprisingly muted. On our own social media feeds, we noted a lot of rather sad attempts at dismissing the editorial — the paper is a Rupert Murdoch owned rag; this is Trumpist nonsense; Europeans juice their defence spending through useless mandatory service requirements. But curiously, we didn’t see anyone try to pull a Julie Dzerowicz and argue that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Canada is actually punching above its weight in NATO.
Look, some of us here at The Line have been reading harsh editorials on Canada’s defence spending for decades. (We’ve written a few, too!) And we’ve never seen anything remotely this harsh from an American outlet. This is absolutely devastating stuff, and it can’t be simply shrugged off because of the source.
A bit of history: In 1995, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World” in an editorial that also referred to the Canadian dollar as the “northern peso”. This was in response to Canada’s national debt and tax rates hitting unsustainable levels. We were an economic basket case, and the Americans were starting to notice.
Lots of Canadian commentators dismissed the editorial on the grounds that the WSJ was just pushing the supposedly-discredited Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney “neoliberal” agenda. But later that year the Chrétien government, with Paul Martin as finance minister, introduced one of the most significant budgets in Canadian history. They slashed federal spending in ways not seen since the end of the Second World War, slashed the public service, gutted the department of defence. But three years later they had balanced the budget, inaugurating an extended period of federal fiscal responsibility that lasted until the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.
The point is not that there’s a cause and effect here — Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin didn’t sit down and go “oh shit, the Journal has weighed in, we have to do something”. It’s that when serious American media get around to noticing stuff about Canada, it is usually because the stuff they are noticing has become such a problem for other countries that our national Emperor’s New Clothes routine is no longer tenable. It is a sign that things have to change, and quickly.
Remember, the Liberal government doesn’t deny that Canada is a NATO laggard and a free rider on defence. Justin Trudeau has admitted as much, both publicly and privately. But up till now, his attitude has been to sort of smirk at the Americans, give his usually smarmy shrug, and say “what are you going to do about it?”
What the Wall Street Journal editorial does is suggest that there could be real consequences for our professed indigence. It is one thing to be left out of AUKUS, which the Liberals continue to falsely characterize as a submarine procurement deal. Getting kicked out of the G7 would something else entirely — it’s the sort of thing the sorts of people who vote Liberal tend to care about.
Canada’s current attitude to collective defence is not sustainable. Our allies have noticed. Either we change, or our allies will change things for us.
June 14, 2023
QotD: In hindsight, calling it “Operation HONOUR” was quite ironic
Loyalty up, remember?
As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and “like she has a choice”. If you were weak in his eyes, he’d belittle you publicly as a “queer” or a “faggot”. The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of “you’re gonna get raped but that doesn’t make you gay”. One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He’d lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.
Overnight I had gone from from being this man’s subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO’s career prospects. That’s when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn’t want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.
[…]
In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan’s children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.
The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF’s senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.
“Shady Maples”, “A Question of Loyalty”, The Powder Horn, 2023-03-12.
May 26, 2023
CH-124 Sea King; Legendary ASW helicopter and example of a deeply flawed defense procurement process
Polyus
Published 21 May 2023The Sea King was a legendary aircraft in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy. It filled the role of hunter and killer in the Cold War against Soviet submarines. By the mid-90s the situation had changed and their retirement seemed eminent. How naive. The process of finding a replacement for this workhorse would be an election promise by government after government for over 30 years. Its replacement, the CH-148 Cyclone, became operational in 2018. This allowed the 55 year old workhorses to finally retire.
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May 4, 2023
Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”
In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:
If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.
This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.
While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.
Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.
And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.
Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.
[…]
When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!
One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!
[…]
At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.
If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.
The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.
Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.
April 27, 2023
Spending more on defence requires more than just turning on the financial taps
In The Line, Philippe Lagassé explains why just pouring more money into the Department of National Defence won’t automatically improve our defence capabilities:
Canadian defence spending is back in the news, thanks to an open letter urging the government to spend two per cent of GDP on the military and a leaked document suggesting Canada won’t hit that NATO target. Like ending the monarchy, defence spending is one of those issues that gets lots of attention once or twice a year, only to fade away before any serious discussion takes place. It’s unlikely that this time will be any different.
[…]
Even if the government wanted to greatly increase defence spending, though, it would have trouble spending that money effectively in the short term. While more money is needed over the long term, the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have to first build up their capacity to spend a much larger budget. As they do so, however, our historical tendency to reduce defence expenditures after pivotal moments should always be kept in mind.
The DND and CAF are already straining to implement the capital equipment and infrastructure programs that were announced in the 2017 defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged. This reflects the fact that department’s capacity to manage procurements has to be built back up after decades of anemic capital spending. There aren’t enough people to move the programs that are currently planned, let alone new ones that could be added. Additional money could be funneled to existing projects, but that wouldn’t be enough to cause an increase to two per cent of GDP in the coming years. The capabilities Canada is currently buying will probably be far more expensive to maintain in the future than the government realizes, which strongly suggests that we do need to gradually get to that number, but this reinforces the need for caution and for managing expectations. If ministers insist that new money be attached to still more new capabilities, DND/CAF will not only have trouble acquiring them, but will be unable to afford them.
One could argue that DND/CAF could get around its capacity challenges by simply buying more equipment “off the shelf”. Instead of getting more people to tackle complex procurements and infrastructure projects, the defence department should focus on simpler acquisitions that require less management. It is important to note, though, that “off the shelf” procurements aren’t an obvious solution either — DND and the CAF don’t specify requirements for the hell of it. Many project requirements reflect the need to integrate new capabilities into the existing force, which is no small feat when mixing new and old technologies and operating from installations across a massive country. Projects that gravitate toward “off the shelf” solutions, moreover, can be challenged by competitors who contend that they can develop a new capability that better meets Canada’s needs. Bombardier‘s response to the government’s plan to buy Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft to fulfil the Canadian Multi-mission Aircraft (CMMA) project is a recent example.
Canada also tends to favour platforms that can perform various missions, which further complicates “off the shelf” procurements, since the equipment sitting on the shelf may not do everything the CAF needs it to do. Unless we want the CAF to be less capable, the way to address this issue is to acquire more platforms that do specific things. The problem is that the CAF would need more people to acquire, operate, and maintain these additional fleets, still more money to sustain this extra equipment, and yet more infrastructure to store it. This approach promises to exacerbate the very problems it’s supposed to solve.
April 24, 2023
Canada won’t meet its defence spending targets, and Trudeau is totally fine saying this to our allies, if not to the public
Canadian defence freeloading has been a hallmark of Canadian government policy since 1968, and as The Line confirms in their weekend dispatch, it should be no surprise that Justin Trudeau is okay continuing his father’s basic policies:
A story we’ve been watching in recent weeks was the remarkable leak of sensitive U.S. national security documents onto the dark web, and from there, widely across social media. A young member of the Air National Guard has been arrested and now faces serious charges. News reports suggest that he had access to classified material at work and began sharing it privately with a small group of online friends, apparently simply to impress and inform them, with no broader political agenda. Some of those friends, in turn, appear to have leaked the documents further afield. It took months before anyone noticed, but once picked up by several individuals with large followings — including some who are none-too-friendly to the U.S. and Western alliance — the story exploded and the full scope of the leak was finally discovered.
This is, for the U.S., a huge embarrassment and a diplomatic nightmare. For us, it was simply a fascinating story. This week, though, we suddenly had the coveted Canadian Angle: the Washington Post claims to have reviewed one of the leaked documents, apparently prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, that assesses Canada’s military serious military deficiencies, and also reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has privately told fellow NATO leaders that Canada isn’t going to hit NATO’s two-per-cent-of-GDP spending target.
To wit:
“Widespread defense shortfalls hinder Canadian capabilities,” the document says, “while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions.”
The assessment, which bears the seal of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Germany is concerned about whether the Canadian Armed Forces can continue to aid Ukraine while meeting its NATO pledges. Turkey is “disappointed” by the Canadian military’s “refusal” to support the transport of humanitarian aid after February’s deadly earthquake there, the document says, and Haiti is “frustrated” by Ottawa’s reluctance to lead a multinational security mission to that crisis-racked nation.
Your Line editors just sort of sighed heavily and rubbed their temples when they read that. It was, to us, nothing we didn’t know already. It was actually almost some kind of a relief to know that the PM will at least say privately what he won’t admit publicly: we aren’t living up to our pledge, and don’t plan to.
The Post says that Trudeau told NATO that there won’t be much more military spending in this country until the political situation here changes. We aren’t sure if he meant the priorities of the voters or the composition of our parliament. It doesn’t matter — it’s true either way. We are disappointed, but again, in no way surprised, to see Trudeau seeing this as an issue that he’ll just accept as-is, as opposed to attempting the hard work of showing actual leadership. He’s always been more about the easy path of demonstrative gestures instead of working hard to achieve real change.
But hey. In this, he has a lot of company. The Tories under Harper were marginally better on defence, but not nearly good enough. We have little faith — next to none, really — that PM Poilievre would do any better on defence. What bums us out the most about this issue is that we recognize and even agree that the choice to neglect defence and shovel those dollars instead into other, more popular vote-buying files does indeed make political sense. It’s what the voters want. We wish it were otherwise. We’ve spent big chunks of our careers trying to change their minds. Our record to date is one of total, utter failure.
Still, never say die, right? So we’ll make this point: we understand and accept the criticism sometimes made by Canadian commentators, who argue that the two-per-cent-of-GDP target is arbitrary and somewhat meaningless. We don’t entirely agree — targets are useful, and two per cent seems reasonable. But we’d be open to an argument that Canada could still punch above its weight in the alliance, even while spending less, if we could deliver key capabilities.
But … we can’t. We probably could, once upon a time, but we can’t even do that now. The air force is a mess. The navy is a mess. The army is a disaster, and couldn’t even send Nova Scotia all the help it asked for after Hurricane Fiona. Sending a token plane or ship on a quick foreign jaunt is symbolism, not above-weight-punching. And the symbolism taps us out.
So we have to pick what we’re doing here, fellow Canucks. We can meet the two-per-cent target. We can find other ways to meaningfully contribute. Or we can do neither of those things, and admit it, but only in private. Right now, alas, we’ve chosen that third option. We see no sign that’ll be changing any time soon.
Pierre Trudeau discovered that Canadian voters are all too willing to accept “peace dividends” in the form of shorting defence spending to goose non-military spending, and few prime ministers since then have done much more than gesture vaguely at changing it. Worse, it’s also quite accepted practice for defence procurement to prioritize “regional economic benefits” over any actual military requirement, which often means Canada buys fewer items (ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, trucks, etc.) at significantly higher prices as long as there’s a shiny new plant in Quebec or New Brunswick that can be the backdrop for government ministers and party MPs to use as a backdrop during the next election campaign. Military capability barely scrapes into the bottom of the priority list on the few occasions that the government feels obligated to spend new money on the Canadian Armed Forces.
Worse, every penny of “new” spending on the military gets announced many times over before any actual cheques are issued, which helps to disguise the fact that it’s the same thing all over again — sometimes for periods stretching out into years. The Canadian military has a well-deserved reputation for keeping ancient equipment up and running for years (or decades) after all our peer nations have moved on to newer kit. It’s a tribute to the technical and maintenance skills of the units involved, but it probably absorbs far more resources to do it over replacing the stuff when it begins to wear out, and it reduces the number available to, and the combat effectiveness of, the front-line troops when they are needed.
April 10, 2023
It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?
This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery
Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.
This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.
And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.
[…]
The mission began in October.
It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.
The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.
April 6, 2023
Tikka T3x Arctic / Canadian Rangers C19 Rifle, 7.62 / .308 Win
Bloke on the Range
Published 29 Mar 2019Bloke unboxes and takes a first look at the Tikka T3x Arctic rifle, adopted as the C19 rifle for the Canadian Rangers in 7.62 NATO / .308 Winchester. Is the hype real? Oh yes! Yes, it really is!
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April 5, 2023
The modern Canadian Army – go on deployment to Poland, train Ukraine troops … and have to buy your own rations
Is it hard to figure out why the Canadian Armed Forces are having recruiting shortfalls when they can’t even manage to feed the troops they send overseas to train Ukrainian soldiers?
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery – https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/current-operations/operation-unifier.html
The Canadian soldiers are in Poland to train Ukrainian military personnel but since Canada did not send military cooks on the mission, the troops were told to eat at local restaurants.
But there is a massive backlog with the Canadian Forces reimbursing the soldiers for those costs, sending some of them thousands of dollars into debt. Their families contacted this newspaper to complain about the situation they say is causing financial stress at home.
After this newspaper [the Ottawa Citizen] inquired about the situation, the Canadian Forces confirmed Monday that there are problems with payments of per diems and the reimbursement of other expenses. The Canadian Forces is now promising to speed up the process.
“We apologize to the members and their families for the distress this has caused, and thank them for their patience,” said Capt. Nicolas Plourde-Fleury, spokesman for Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC). “We want them to know we have implemented measures to better support them moving forward.”
Approximately 100 Canadian military personnel are currently serving in Poland as part of a contingent to train Ukraine troops. The first arrived in October 2022 but the mission added more personnel in February and March.
As part of Operation Unifier, the Canadian soldiers are providing training in basic and advanced engineering skills, the use of explosives for demolition work, demining and skills relating to the use and operation of the Leopard 2 tanks in combat.
The Canadian Forces usually has its own cooks to provide troops with food. But in this situation, the Canadians initially received their meals from the Polish military. Later, the Canadian soldiers were told to eat in local restaurants and they would be reimbursed by the Canadian Forces.
February 13, 2023
It’s open season for balloons over North America
In The Line, yet another incursion into NORAD air space, and no, this isn’t a re-post from last week:
Holy jumpin’ Jeepers, folks, we’ve got more balloons!
On Friday, the Americans shot down another unidentified flying object — gulp — off the coast of Alaska. By Saturday, NORAD was reporting yet another one, this time over Canadian territory. NORAD jets scrambled, and an American F-22 destroyed the object over Yukon. Canadian military teams are now en route to recover the wreck and find out what the hell we are shooting at.
This was an exciting enough little pick-me-up on Saturday, but it wasn’t done. Later that night, another air defence emergency was declared over Montana, and American F-15 jets were scrambled out of Oregon to intercept an object that had been detected on radar. They were not able to find anything, and as of press time, NORAD has said only that they will continue to monitor the situation.
A few points we’d make about a truly bizarre series of stories.
The first is that there’s nothing wrong or particularly embarrassing about an American plane defending Canadian air space. NORAD is a joint bi-national command. Missions are tasked to the first available aircraft. That might sometimes mean a Canadian jet defending U.S. territory. It’s happened! On Saturday, the object was closer to American bases in Alaska than the nearest CF-18 base in Alberta. There probably is a conversation worth having about whether Canada should maintain a small alert force of jets further north, better able to respond in the future. That’s expensive and logistically complicated, but may still be worth considering. For now, the system functioned as intended. So we say, quite sincerely, thanks, America. We appreciate the help.
That being said, we do think this is a useful reminder that the long and repeated delays by Canada to both replace the aging CF-18 jets and modernize NORAD with new sensors and capabilities were reckless and dumb. It was obvious that the CF-18s needed replacing when Stephen Harper took office, but we only got that underway in recent months. NORAD, for its part, functions well as an institution but needs upgraded technology. That project also should have begun many years ago. In both cases, we delayed because we didn’t want to spend the money and because defence projects in this country are almost always politically fraught. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the weird series of aerial intruders is a useful reminder that neglecting your own defences is never a good idea. We are realists about Canada’s ability to field a massive military, but our geography, in so many ways a blessing, does impose a few costs back on us. It’s not easy to patrol and police such massive territories, especially with a relatively small and concentrated population. But we have to do it. It’s what being a country means. Too often, we haven’t. We hope that changes. With the NORAD modernization announced and the F-35s ordered, perhaps we’re finally making right some of these failures. We hope so. But we are jaded, friends. We admit that.
Our final point is an appeal to calm. We don’t really know what the hell is happening with all these aerial intruders either, but there could easily be a pretty mundane explanation. Radar sets have programmable software filters that are intended to avoid cluttering up the scopes with too much information. Without these filters, clouds, snow storms and birds can cause returns that may look like planes and missiles. One way of filtering out such clutter is by establishing a minimum speed for flagging an object. Balloons are likely normally below that minimum. Your Line editors suspect that part of what is happening right now is that we’ve adjusted those filters, and are suddenly seeing things that were already there all along.
Is that better, or worse? We don’t know. We can make that argument either way. In any case, that may be what’s happening.
Or hell, maybe it’s aliens, and Canada and the U.S. just declared war on a more sophisticated race that travelled across the vastness of the stars only to end their journey by being murdered by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. We doubt it, to be honest. But it’s been a weird few years already, no?
December 22, 2022
It may have taken most of the year, but Canada finally figured out its Ukraine position
In The Line, Andrew Potter theorizes that the Canadian government finally “got it right” on Ukraine, but only after having exhausted all the other possibilities:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery.
When Russia started massing troops on the border in Ukraine this time last year, Canada was one of the first Western countries to close its embassy in Kyiv, moving everyone to Lviv on February 12. Hours after Russia launched its illegal, insane, nihilistic, genocidal full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, all non-Ukrainian employees of our embassy scooted across the border into Poland.
For months after the invasion, that highly risk-averse attitude infected every aspect of Canada’s approach to helping Ukraine. Whether it was diplomacy (hesitant), military aid (slow and limited), financial support (inadequate) or straight-up moral fortitude (lacking), the Trudeau government made it clear that it would do the least amount necessary, while taking the most credit possible, in supporting Ukraine.
[…]
The weird thing about Canada’s foot-draggy-as-she-goes approach to helping Ukraine is how little sense it made politically, for both domestic and international audiences. Canada has one of the largest Ukrainian diaspora populations in the world. We were the first Western country to recognize Ukrainian independence in 1991. The deputy prime minister of Canada is half Ukrainian and has been a loud supporter of the country for years. Privately and publicly, our allies were pleading for us to do more.
Who knows what it was that finally shook some sense into the Trudeau government. Maybe it was Freeland, maybe it was a call from Uncle Joe Biden, maybe it was just a sense in the PMO that, having exhausted all other options, the only thing left to do was the right thing. Whatever it was, over the last three or four months, Canada is finally punching its weight on the global stage on the Ukraine file. In particular, we seem to have finally figured out that the best way to help is to provide the sorts of support that draws on our strengths.
So for example, while the handful of M777 howitzers we sent were certainly useful (and the ammunition we’re continuing to supply will be well spent) we’re never going to compete with the Americans or Brits when it comes to heavy arms supplies. That’s why, back in October, it was probably more helpful for us to send 400,000 pieces of winter gear and to provide a few million dollars worth of satellite communications to the Ukrainians through Telesat. And it was great to see Canada re-engage with its training commitments to the Ukrainian armed forces through the deployment of 40 combat engineers to train Ukrainian sappers in Poland, to complement our ongoing training of recruits in the U.K.
December 17, 2022
Canada’s consciously anemic foreign and military policies
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why Canada consistently fails to “punch above their weight” in foreign and military matters and that it’s not at all accidental:
Canadian politicians have an inputs problem. Maybe that’s actually the wrong way to describe it — the problem is with the outputs. But it’s the inputs they love talking about.
If that all sounds a little vague, maybe this sounds familiar: “Hey there, citizen. Alarmed about Troubling Issue X? Well, don’t worry. We’re pledging $300 million over the next six years to Troubling Issue X. Oh, and Annoying Irritant Y? We’re announcing a task force to report back on that.”
Does Troubling Issue X get solved? Does Annoying Irritant Y get less annoying and irritating? Eh. We probably don’t collect enough stats to even know. The purpose of the announcement isn’t to solve the problem. It’s to announce something and hope people stop paying attention.
Canadian politicians — especially the current federal government — are notorious for announcing the same “new thing” in as many ways and in as many different contexts as they can. They get several hundred dollars of positive press coverage for every actual dollar spent on whatever the announced spending is supposed to be devoted toward. If they can recycle announcements from months past into a new set of announcements, you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll do it. Announcing spending is, one must assume, what gets people to cast their votes for the party announcing the spending.
A lot of what looks like policy failure in Canadian foreign and military affairs only looks like a failure when you forget that accomplishing something wasn’t the point. Being photographed and videotaped saying you’ll accomplish something was the point. And the announcement itself accomplishes that!
This was true even before the Trudeau government started handing out bushel baskets of money to various Canadian newspapers, TV networks, magazines, and other legacy media entities. What was once merely praise is now bought sychophancy from the (literally) paid media.
On the military side of things, the Canadian Armed Forces are an organization the government grudgingly funds, but only enough to look good for the self-same media:
It’s not that Canada accomplishes nothing on the world stage. We accomplish things. Sometimes we even play an outsized role — Canada did, for instance, perform well and above expectations in Kandahar. The odd exception aside, though, when it comes to foreign policy generally and especially with defence policy, successive Canadian governments have set a very clear target: we will do, technically, more than nothing. We won’t often do much more than that. But we’ll do enough to not get kicked out of the club of allied nations.
Why do we want to be in the club? Not because we feel any sense of duty or obligation to lead and take on any real burden. But because being in the club makes us safer, and it would, after all, be embarrassing to get kicked out.
It’s important to remember that Canada is, by any standard, a rich country. We could be an actual force for good and stability on the world stage if we wanted to. We could build a bigger fleet and patrol more places, more often — we’d be welcome! We could have a bigger army and lead more peacekeeping missions, or contribute more to NATO. A bigger air force, likewise, could contribute more to our allies, especially in Europe in these unsettled times. In a parallel universe where we did these things, we’d then be able to say with a straight face that the purpose of Canada’s navy was contributing to the safety and security of the seas, the purpose of our army was to assist allies and provide peacekeepers to help end international crises, and the purpose of our air force was to project power and bring support to threatened allies.
In the world we actually live in, though, the purpose of the navy is to technically have a navy that technically does things, the purpose of the army is to technically have an army that technically does things, and the purpose of the air force … you see where this is going, right?
Our navy does things! It shows up places, and patrols areas. But only as much as necessary to technically tick that box. The army is in much the same condition; with a growing number of domestic commitments sapping its strength and budget, even its ability to assist with disasters at home is largely maxed out, but we send a few hundred soldiers here and there, thereby allowing ourselves to proclaim that we’ve … sent soldiers somewhere. The air force, as was just reported this week, can’t even really do even that much this year. The exhausted force is skipping the very modest — a half-dozen fighter jets — annual mission to Europe. The air force is just too burnt out to sustain even that tiny mission.
This is a big and growing problem. Canada, again, is rich enough to make a difference in global security affairs, if we chose to make different choices with how we spend our money. We have made the opposite choice. We field just enough of a military to be able to make just enough difference to avoid being accused of being total deadbeats, and no more.
Can it fight? Eh, maybe a bit. Can it make a difference? Depends how you define “difference”, I guess. Does it make the world and our allies safer? In a way? Can it keep Canadians safe at home? Sort of.
This isn’t a failure of our policy. This is our policy. We show up with as little as possible for as brief a time as possible, but gosh, do we ever talk about the showing up.
December 9, 2022
Canada’s “historic” shift toward the Indo-Pacific is … more marketing than strategy
In The Line, retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day distills down all the airy phrases to see just what the Canadian government is actually going to do in the Indo-Pacific as opposed to merely talking about it:
“Red circle/oval roughly depicts the Indian Ocean region. Blue circle/oval covers the Pacific region. Green oval covers ASEAN. Yellow overlay covers the Indo Pacific.”
Map annotation by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.
A formal public-policy statement from the Government of Canada is a rare thing. It is even rarer when it is not just a speech but a published written document. The rarest of these is undoubtedly when such a document focuses on foreign policy. When Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly recently pitched her “once-in-a-generation shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, much was made of why Canada was doing it and what it would achieve. No fewer than four cabinet ministers took part in the announcement. Canada will, they announced, step up naval patrols of the region, continue to expand trade with China while also tightening our protections of intellectual property and ownership rules for strategic industries, and use “Team Canada” trade missions to boost commercial links with other growing regional economic powers, including India. We seek also to expand our intelligence and cybersecurity links with allies and partners in the region.
Now that the dust on the rhetoric has settled, closer examination reveals that this might simply be an exercise of branding separate activities into a marketing-friendly bundle, as opposed to a coherent plan focused on achieving specific outcomes.
In examining the document two approaches are equally useful in assessing value: whether the content has some substance and whether the policy framework is sufficiently robust to hang various activities and plans on its body.
Three hints are provided as to why the new plan might not be the cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy that it portends to be. Firstly, operating in the “National Interest”, a phrase used six separate times over the 26 pages, is given neither form nor function and lacks any definition. It is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat talking to Alice asking her “where do you want to get to”. When Alice replies that “I don’t much care …” the Cheshire Cat wisely suggests that “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” With no definition of national interests pretty much anything can be hand waved as to being necessary and required, or not, for its achievement.
This leads in turn to the second hint that the plan might be more posturing than substance. Lacking the single aimpoint of operating in the national interest, the “objectives” supposedly fill that gap by providing a set of specific achievements which in combination would be a sufficiently clear aimpoint. But normally objectives can, and should, be thought of as something specific and measurable, allowing plans to be developed to achieve them. “Save 100 dollars this month” or perhaps, in more relevant terms, “Increase our trade in the Indo-Pacific region by 100 per cent over the five years of this policy enactment.” Plans can then be developed to achieve those objectives. But reviewing those objectives reveals that they are themselves actions, not end-states. It appears that the policy is based on “doing, not achieving”. I am reminded of my sons many years ago. When asked if their rooms were clean, they would reply, “I’m cleaning it.” The process was enduring but we most certainly disagreed on the value of the activity as opposed to achieving a measurable result. Under this construct the government can claim that as long as Canada is doing stuff the policy should be considered a success.
