ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL
For most of our history Canada’s defence policy could be described as: oceans, cold and the Americans. On three sides, thousands of miles of blue water separated us from the nearest predator; on the fourth was the world’s friendliest superpower. To boot, most of the territory we had to defend was frozen tundra, uninhabitable to all but the world’s hardiest people.
If we have remained uninvaded since 1812, it is not for anything we have or could have done ourselves – or even, one suspects, our defence treaties with the Americans – but because nobody was much interested in invading us. Canada’s sovereignty has always been equal parts bluff and illusion – imagine a nation of three million, as we were at Confederation, laying claim to the northern half of the continent and getting away with it – but it has become noticeably threadbare of late.
Because no part of the Canadian defence triad can still be relied upon with certainty. Distance over water offers less protection than it might have in the past, not only thanks to advances in transportation, but because the threat is no longer necessarily physical – an invasion, or missile attack – but cyber or even psychological. The cold that once made the North so forbidding – and the Northwest Passage unnavigable – is receding.
And the United States, so long the bedrock of our existence as a stable, united, democratic power that would always come to our defence – or at the least would not itself pose a threat – can no longer safely be described in such terms. The next 12 months promise to be the most perilous in that country’s history since the Civil War, with non-trivial risks of political violence, authoritarian repression and worse.
The risks to which we are thus exposed are far from theoretical. For even as our vulnerability has increased the threats to our security have escalated, and multiplied.
Sensing American weakness, the world’s autocratic powers have become more aggressive, more ruthless and more concerted in their attacks on the democratic world: overtly, in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – soon to be joined, perhaps, by Taiwan – and covertly, in the various campaigns of disinformation, interference and intimidation with which we have become familiar.
The latter have grown – or rather, perhaps, our knowledge of them has grown – to a quite alarming scale. The Russians have proved particularly adept at disinformation, spread via social media and assorted Russian assets, paid or otherwise, among them the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for president.
China, as we have learned, has a comparative advantage in political interference, being able to recruit elements of the Chinese diaspora, often unwillingly. Credible intelligence reports allege Beijing has planted supporters at every level of our politics, federal, provincial and municipal.
Iran, for its part, seems to prefer overt intimidation: Witness the mobs it helped send into the streets of every Western city after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in the name of “globalizing the intifada.”
It is far from alone. Indeed, the discretionary political violence the autocracies have traditionally wielded against their own people has increasingly become their weapon of choice in other countries, including Canada.
As I write, the former federal cabinet minister and international human-rights advocate Irwin Cotler, a staunch defender of Israel in its current conflict with Hamas, is under 24-hour police protection after receiving death threats.
India, nominally still a democracy but under the Modi government an increasingly illiberal one, is suspected of having ordered the murder of one Canadian citizen and conspired to commit several more.
Chinese Canadians are expressing fears about testifying before the public inquiry into foreign political interference, particularly after the judge leading the inquiry gave standing to two politicians accused of close ties to Beijing to cross-examine them. Iranian Canadians have likewise raised the alarm at the presence of hundreds of agents of the regime in Canada.
These mounting threats to our security would be disturbing enough in their own right. But what makes the situation something of a crisis is that none of our instruments for detecting and countering them are functional: From the RCMP, to the military, to the intelligence services, to the diplomatic corps, all are in various stages of disarray, whether as a result of cultural failings, structural weaknesses, lack of funding, or some combination of the three.
The RCMP’s problems are perhaps the most notorious. The forces’ serial bungling of important cases, its susceptibility to political influence, its militaristic (and misogynistic) culture, its substandard leadership, have all led to repeated calls for reform, even its replacement.
The military, likewise, is teetering on the edge of collapse: Unable to recruit, incapable of properly equipping those it does recruit, saddled with a procurement regime that routinely sacrifices the needs of military preparedness to the demands of politics, it is all the Canadian Armed Forces can do to put even a single brigade in the field.
Created in 1984, after the revelations of abuses against civil liberties by what was then the intelligence division of the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has lately been roiled by accusations of abuse of a different kind: namely, sexual assault of its own officers by fellow officers. The agency’s effectiveness has been further undermined by its seeming inability, notably in the matter of Chinese interference, to get anyone else in government to act on its findings.
More critically, Canada is obliged to look for intelligence on foreign adversaries with one eye, lacking an international intelligence capacity to match CSIS’s domestic responsibilities. An effort was made to deploy Foreign Affairs officers in its place. Lightly trained, inadequately supervised, the results have not been encouraging.
Last, Canada’s diplomatic corps, according to a just-released report by a Senate committee, is understaffed, directionless and suffering a crisis of morale.
Canada, in short, has become a sitting duck, unable or unwilling either to defend itself or to contribute to the collective defence, a hotbed of money laundering and other international crime, a growing security risk, in all an unreliable ally. Other countries are grappling with the same threats, but in no other is there quite the same sense of helplessness.
The natural defences that long protected us having withered away, we seem incapable of replacing them with anything. We have lost the habit; the instincts for self-preservation have dulled, the muscles atrophied.
The policies of the current government may be faulted in part, notably its naive/cynical embrace of China early in its tenure, its failure to come to grips with (in the most charitable interpretation) China’s interference efforts, its unwillingness to live up to our NATO commitments on defence spending, and its continued reluctance to acknowledge the emerging autocratic challenge to the democracies, at least as it implies fully siding with the democracies.
As evidence of the latter, witness Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s recent homily on the virtues of “pragmatic diplomacy,” and the need to avoid choosing sides between the democracies and their adversaries. Or as the minister put it: “We must resist the temptation to divide the world into rigid ideological camps. For the world cannot be reduced to democracies versus autocracies.”
Perhaps it can’t, but it seems nevertheless to be doing a good job of it on its own. Ms. Joly’s invocation of Pierre Trudeau as her inspiration, her claim that Canada during his time “was seen as a credible partner,” her declaration that “we cannot just rely on our old friends” but must “double down on forward-leaning engagement,” whatever that means, do not fill one with confidence.
When she says, “We need to demand that every country respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of others,” the question should surely arise: You and whose army? What happens if, heaven forfend, other countries do not respond to her demands? To whom would she turn for aid, having traded in her “old friends” for new?
So yes, the current government can be faulted in part. But in truth our fecklessness and indifference to our own security needs is bipartisan and long-standing.
It has been decades since the RCMP was a source of national pride, rather than embarrassment. The military has been in decline since the 1960s: Lester Pearson, everybody’s favourite peacenik, spent 4 per cent of GDP on defence – three times as much, proportionately, as under recent governments, Liberal or Conservative. Foreign Affairs, likewise, has been treated as an afterthought for generations, as a series of inconsequential ministers revolved through its doors.
But politicians have to get elected, and the truth is Canadians expected no more of them, and demanded no more of them. No government in recent times was elected or defeated because of its performance on foreign affairs, defence or national security. Faced with a choice between spending more on the military, and spending more on social programs, Canadians to this day will unhesitatingly choose the latter.
We have, in short, been living in a fool’s paradise. We cannot afford to do so any longer. The world is too dangerous a place, and if we didn’t know it before we cannot pretend we do not know it now: The costs of our cluelessness have become too obvious to ignore. Our refusal to bear our share of the costs of defending the democracies is increasingly causing us to be shut out of international councils. Our habit of treating defence and foreign policy as an extension of diaspora politics is creating dangerous divisions at home. The weakness of our intelligence and police services is putting Canadian lives at risk. Even our territorial integrity can no longer be taken for granted.
At some point leaders have to lead. National security – the safety of our citizens – is the first responsibility of governments, the priority before all others. We must – it is no longer an option – devote more resources to national defence, which necessarily means devoting less to other things. We must reform procurement, making “bang for the buck,” not “jobs for the boys,” the sole criterion.
We need root-and-branch reform of the RCMP, divesting its local constabularies to the provinces and professionalizing what remains: an elite national police force on the lines of the FBI. We need a separate foreign intelligence-gathering agency: an MI6 to CSIS’s MI5. We need to take foreign policy seriously, with the diplomatic resources to match.
Above all, we need to live in the real world. We have avoided catastrophe until now – or rather a second catastrophe, after Air India – more or less by luck, but at some point our inattention and inaction are going to catch up with us.