Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 3 - Evidence, November 15, 2004
OTTAWA, Monday, November 15, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 9:40 a.m. to examine and report on the need for a national security policy for Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Colin Kenny. I am the chair of the committee. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. I will introduce the members of the committee to you.
Senator Norman Atkins, from Ontario, spent more than 27 years in the field of communications. Senator Atkins has been involved in a great deal of charity work, including serving as chair of fundraising for Camp Trillium, a camp for kids with cancer.
Senator Meighen is also from Ontario. He is a lawyer and a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and of the bar of the Province of Quebec. Senator Meighen is a great patron of the arts and is currently involved with the Stratford Festival as its past chair.
Senator Munson, from Ontario, has had an extensive career in journalism, both in Canada and abroad. He was CTV`s bureau chief in Beijing from 1987 to 1992, reporting on events in China such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. As a journalist he has covered the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War, and the Philippines.
Senator Terry Mercer is from Nova Scotia. He was appointed to the Senate in 2003. Previously, he held a wide variety of positions with charitable institutions. From 1993 to 1995, he was Executive Director of the Metro Toronto Branch of the Canadian Diabetes Association. From 1997 to 2003 he was Vice-President and Director, Financial Development, of the YMCA of Greater Toronto.
Senator Marilyn Trenholme Counsell is from New Brunswick. She has served as a nutritionist with the governments of New Brunswick and Ontario. She was a family physician for the Toronto General and Sackville Memorial hospitals. She was also a Minister of State for the Province of New Brunswick and, most recently, its Lieutenant-Governor.
Our committee is the first permanent Senate committee mandated to examine security and defence. During the last Parliament we completed a number of reports, beginning with Canadian Security and Military Preparedness. This study, which was tabled in February 2002, examined the major defence and security issues facing Canada.
The Senate then asked our committee to examine the need for a national security policy. So far, we have released five reports on various aspects of national security: first, Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility, in September 2002; second, Update on Canada's Military Crisis: A View From the Bottom Up, in November 2002; third, The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports, in January 2003; fourth, Canada's Coastlines: The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World; and fifth and most recently, National Emergencies: Canada's Fragile Front Lines, in March 2004.
Our committee is now turning its attention to a review of Canadian defence policy. During the next year the committee will hold hearings in every province and engage with Canadians to determine national interests, what they see as Canada's principal threats and how they would like the government to respond.
The committee will attempt to generate debate on national security in Canada and forge a public consensus on the need for the military. This morning, our first witness is Desmond Morton. He is the founding director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and is Hiram Mills Professor in the Department of History at McGill University. Welcome to the committee.
Mr. Desmond Morton, Professor, Department of History, McGill University: I was very flattered and a little surprised by the invitation because I am a fairly notorious skeptic about policy reviews. I understand their attraction and I am well aware of their pitfalls, since when I wrote A Military History of Canada I had expected to get considerable guidance from them, and I did. The trouble was — and you may well escape this by greater genius or greater independence — they usually led in the wrong direction.
In 1949, for example, Brooke Claxton, not a stupid man, by any means, a well-informed and able minister, produced a White Paper on Defence which anticipated that Canada's defence problems would be substantial and domestic and that defence efforts had to be directed almost wholly to the protection of Canada. A year later we were in Korea, two years later we were in Europe, and the defence of Canada was a minor priority for the next 10 years.
In 1964, Paul Hellyer produced a white paper which said, appropriately for his Prime Minister, that peacekeeping would be the biggest thing we would do from then on. In some respects he was right, but we did not inaugurate any new projects for the rest of that decade. We had finished doing Cyprus, which became a major holding operation. If you were to read the Hellyer white paper, apart from a few discreet words about unification buried in the text, you would not have a clue what was to happen in Canadian defence.
Recently, my former student, Perrin Beatty, produced a paper that was remarkably wrong. It was entirely understandable; it was exactly what people expected him to say in 1985. However, as a projection of future policy, it was an amazing gift to his critics.
I give you that warning because history is not entirely encouraging about this enterprise, and for obvious reasons. As someone has said — it may have been me — only God knows what will happen and she is not telling. That is a serious problem for all of us who make plans. You have to make plans because it is very difficult to begin from a standing start in defence issues.
You cannot go down to Wal-Mart and buy the gear; you cannot put a recruiting station on Sparks Street and get qualified personnel. You may pretend to, and Canada has done that continuously, in two world wars and whenever. The result, of course, is a hidden part of our military history. Canadians do not want to dwell on why we did so badly in both world wars.
We want to say we did brilliantly. Veterans, more than anyone, want that story. Why did the navy fail to sink submarines until the end of the war? For a good reason: They did not have a clue about sinking submarines in 1939. It was not their specialty. They were to be a little part of the British fleet.
That was not what was called for; however, getting the equipment and the knowledge, the skill and the training was not something that could be accomplished with a raw navy, with homemade equipment.
I could go on and say the same about the air force and the army. Why did we do badly at Dieppe? It was a terrible situation to be in. It was notable that the troops who were well trained and well equipped — for example, the Royal Marines — did not do nearly as badly as troops who had been poorly trained in England for several years by officers and NCOs who did not have very good training themselves. You cannot rise from that base quickly or easily.
Canadians easily pass over that to tell themselves how heroic and how sacrificial they were. Sacrificial, yes. Heroic, yes. Successful? Well, best not look too closely. That is why knowing what will happen is so important. If you can overcome the reluctance of the Deity to share that future with you, blessings be on your head. The trouble is that what God will say will happen may not be widely or universally believed by your fellow Canadians. I would argue that if that part of the Beatty white paper that would have led us into 12 nuclear-powered submarines had been followed, our navy would be better equipped today. That is not to do with acquisitions; I simply say that navies can use these nuclear-powered submarines for a variety of tasks that I can see stretching ahead of us and which have stretched behind us. However, at the time, it was virtually unthinkable for three reasons. First, because of the instinctive lobby of Canadians, who, when they hear the word “nuclear,” salivate in rage and indignation; second, because the business community looked at the cost and sent messages, copies of which I saw, to the government of that day saying “Do not go there”; third, because the Pentagon sent that message, not only more discreetly, but also much more influentially.
In the questions I received, I was asked: What are Canada's interests? Quite simply, they are to avoid the problems that national defence and national security are designed to prevent; to achieve peace, security and national integrity; and to preserve the basis of our prosperity. It is also worth noting, though it is not common to do so, that by those very standards, Canada has had an amazingly successful defence policy over its history since Confederation. We have not been invaded. We have not been pillaged or severed. Our losses in war have been substantial, and no one this close to November 11 can forget that, but they have been by our choice. They have not been imposed upon us by assaults from outside so much as by our own decision to support our allies.
Canadians have a repeated, demonstrated interest in being at peace, and, to an amazing degree, our policies have allowed them to do so. Compare our experience with that of any significant power in the 20th century. I think I make my point, though you will notice it is not a point commonly made to people who probably come before this committee.
I think a lot of that has to do with a decision made very early in Confederation by the then Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, whom I see offered across the street as a great Canadian. I have no question about that. I think I was here with Senator Lynch-Staunton to urge the commemoration of a Macdonald Day, and a Laurier Day, too. In 1867, Great Britain fulfilled an intention that was the direct result of a sensible evaluation of a long-standing British policy, and that was to defend Canada against the United States. The British had, in those years, spent an incredible amount of money defending Canada, building the Rideau Canal, Old Fort Henry, the citadels in Quebec and in Halifax, and maintaining a garrison of British troops in Canada virtually equal in strength to the U.S. regular army.
The Civil War forced the British, quietly and discreetly, to ask themselves whether this was possible any longer. The answer came back very clearly: We cannot win another War of 1812. The sensible thing is to pull out; and they did. By November 11, 1871, the last British soldier got on a ship in Quebec City harbour and that was the end of the British garrison. Of course, they left behind urgent instructions to the new Confederation to defend itself to the death, to arm itself. Indeed, they left the weapons here for us. The government of that day took a very different line, for which it has been condemned by defence enthusiasts, British generals and Canadian colonels ever since. That was simply this: If we did not threaten the Americans, they would not threaten us. It was a big gamble at the time — a gamble against much Canadian public opinion, particularly influential opinion — but in return for $1 million, the Macdonald government got enough militia to protect the border from, essentially, our invasions and our troublemaking in the United States. That was certainly the primary function of the militia as it was structured by Sir George-Étienne Cartier in 1868. When our Prairie West was ours and also threatened American peace of mind, we created 300 members of the Northwest Mounted Police to patrol that border and to preserve its security and integrity. That is a brilliant defence policy that lasted for a long time and is at the heart of the success of Canadian defence policy as we collectively, as a people, remember it.
I do not recall reading in Macdonald's hagiographies any recognition of this brilliance. I think it was taken for granted, like so many other things in history. If I have tried to draw it to people's attention, it is to do overdue justice to the old chieftain's memory. Also, it is to remind us of how and why Canadians feel about defence, as they so clearly do.
I have told this story perhaps several times, and you may have heard it from me or others like me. In the spring of 2001, I was in Washington with a group of Canadian and American academic specialists on Canada, briefing our current American ambassador on this country he was going to. It was not entirely necessary. Mr. Cellucci, as Governor of Massachusetts, had already learned a lot about more Canada than I suspect many Canadians know about the United States, or certainly about Massachusetts. One of the other members of our team, Joel Sokolsky, who teaches political science at the Royal Military College, started his presentation with these memorable words: The military problem of Canada is that we have no military problem.
Well, that fell like a lose thump on people because Mr. Cellucci thought we had a military problem of unpreparedness — we were not up to the mark — and he proceeded to say so. However, as he spoke his part, I began to realize that he was saying things that would come as a complete surprise to the great many Canadians to whom I have spoken on this subject. Not they are unaware of our unpreparedness. Opinion polls showed us that.
However, those same opinion polls revealed that most Canadians did not think it was a high priority to do something about the problem, even when they recognized it.
After all, I had grown up in Canada during the Diefenbaker years, when we were urged to build fallout shelters. With remarkable consistency, Canadians, who should have been aware of the potential for thermonuclear disaster — newspapers were filled with reports of such a possibility — did not build shelters. The Prime Minister did; individuals did; people who occasionally got their names in the newspaper did; but it is evident that the great majority of Canadians did not.
I remember during the Cuban missile crisis — as I wrote in a recent issue of the LRC — standing on the parade square at Camp Borden with our empty trucks behind us, our next mission to go and rescue the survivors of Toronto, including my parents, from the smoking ruins of that city after the crisis had run its course and wondering why the nuclear disarmament lobby had so strongly urged them to not build any protection for themselves, and why everyone in Toronto had taken that advice.
The answer was that they did not believe in that threat. It was another cry of “Wolf, wolf!” It seems to me that, in the ensuing years, that cry has come many times and Canadians have responded as the shepherds in the fable eventually responded.
After the professor had said this, at a discreet interval, I asked him, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “There is no real threat to Canada that Canadians perceive.” I said, “Are you sure? It seems to me we have always had three invulnerable sides — the three oceans and the Arctic — but there is a fourth side, from which every danger has always come.” He said, “Yes, but do you expect me to say that in Washington, in front of a U.S. ambassador? Have some sense.” Yes, I understand that.
In fact, the threat does come from there. The pressure comes from there. The reality comes from there. In fact, we do have a military problem. The problem is not the defence of Canada from the Americans, unless, perhaps, you are Mel Hurtig. It is the defence of North America and the part we must play in that defence. After all, another date worth remembering is August 20, 1940, when the Prime Minister of Canada went to Ogdensburg and asked the President of the United States for fulfillment of the promise Roosevelt had made two years earlier at Queen's University when he got his honorary degree, that they would be there to defend us against any other empire. I think he meant, at the time, Japan, and in 1940 it was Nazi Germany.
On August 20, 1940, Canada turned to the United States and the result was a news release of an important treaty in that forum. Senator Munson will recognize it as a document of significance. That news release led to the permanent joint board of defence, and while perhaps that permanent joint board could have lapsed at the end of the Second World War, we know that it did not because another war ensued — the Cold War, thank goodness, and in that Cold War the confirmation of our partnership in North American defence was established.
Perhaps at the end of the Cold War, in 1989 or 1990, we might again have changed our position, but we did not. I often think that one of the tragedies of Gen. D'Allaire's experience in Rwanda is that he was the one general I knew who was determined to rethink how national defence was planned and carried out in Canada and, of course, after Rwanda, he was no longer fit to give that kind of leadership. It has been a tragedy that we have not had that alternative in those years; but, of course, as of September 11, 2001, we clicked back into position, into the most predictable and logical arrangement and the most predictable and logical obligation, which we continue to have.
Therefore, for all of these reasons, we have responsibilities. We do not necessarily have threat perceptions, but we have to be ready. Being ready is awfully difficult. What is the wisdom that we should be seeking? I as a historian only know what has gone on in the past. I have no prophetic skills, although those would make for a good living. Historians are never welcomed for what they remember. They are only welcomed for what they absolutely do not know but which everybody wants, which is prediction. I am not in that category.
To meet some people's expectations of what we should be doing, not least those of some of my American colleagues, and perhaps those that you know better than I, this country could well be bankrupted by the need to modernize our forces to the standard the Americans have achieved, want to achieve, or know they have to achieve.
What do Canadians want? Over time — I think it is not a big secret — they want a source of pride. They are embarrassed, if not necessarily to the point of action, to believe that their forces are ill-equipped, inferior in quality, and small in size and significance. We want, like all minor powers, a source of pride in our military organization.
We also want minimal casualties. You are aware of the acute sensitivity of Canadians to losses, however small they have been, as are Americans.
When we adopt a policy of putting more infantry on the ground — I presume that is one interpretation of Mr. Martin's election-time promise of 5,000 more pairs of boots on the ground — remember that people who wear boots on the ground in dangerous places are vulnerable, which is why allies always want them, why the British wanted soldiers in 1914-15 and in 1939-40, and why governments might want to provide sophisticated equipment. I have noted — as I am sure you have as well — that it has been possible to keep a significant squadron in the Arabian Sea throughout the whole of the post-9/11 crisis without losing an individual. It has been impossible to keep troops in Afghanistan even in a relatively non-combative situation without casualties.
Canadians want success and they want recognition, and they want it at a very low cost or none at all.
Finally, like all junior allies, we want praise from our allies. I do not think those are mysteries. How we achieve them, however, is a question that this committee will address with much better resources than I have.
The Chairman: Thank you, Professor Morton.
Senator Munson: Welcome, professor. At the beginning of your talk, I think you implied that reviews are a waste of time.
Mr. Morris: No, they are difficult, and getting them right has been rare.
Senator Munson: As the chair mentioned, we are on a defence review. What kind of direction do you think we should take?
Mr. Morris: I think some of the other questions that were offered to me, such as, “What do Canadians want?” may be more profitable because there are answers, confusing and contradictory answers, no doubt, but confusion and contradiction is a common experience when dealing with human beings.
Understanding complexity seems to me more of a challenge to all people dealing in public policy than any other. Sorting out ways through confusion is even better leadership and a product of the experience that most Canadians associate with solidly led Senate committees.
Senator Munson: In your statement you talked about the defence of North America and the share we must pay. With the amount of money the Americans are pouring into the defence of North America, how can we, in our budgets, ever play at least a small role in that defence? I do not think we will ever be able to catch up.
Mr. Morton: You have emphasized “small.” I do not know what “small” means. When I come to Ottawa, it seems to add a couple of zeros to the “small” I am familiar with in trying to operate my corner of McGill. It is expensive, and it becomes more expensive.
I now have a subscription to a fascinating publication called Defense News. It is “the” journal of the military industrial complex. I thought I would bring a copy here, although you probably subscribe to it. You should see it in its bi-weekly manifestation.
This is an American publication. It is the world's view of defence production, sales, contracts, rival bids and the complex national struggles over European versus American versus Indian and Pakistani production. It is an amazing reminder that we are one integrated world. The arms industry is more global than any, even if it competes vigorously.
This publication deals with such issues as how to keep Boeing alive. A big issue for the magazine is how to keep alive the European aero defence systems, or EADS? How do you keep the Russian aircraft industry going, or should you? If you did not, what would they do?
I am not here to flog subscriptions to Defense News, but the committee should be aware of this publication. It says a great deal about what is going on in the world. Canada even pops up occasionally, as we did with the HMCS Chicoutimi, and as we do with our helicopter acquisitions and their problems.
What we do will be small. However, we have terrain to offer, if we chose to, or not, as the case may be, for the ballistic missile system. Have we asked the Americans what they would like us to do? I think we were planning to, and the feeling was that that was going too far. Have we engaged in any kind of overture negotiations to see what we would do?
If Canadians were to become frightened about nuclear missiles, then our negligence in this area would be a source of public indignation. I am talking now about people different from the anti-missile people I have been reviewing, such as Mel Hurtig; but they would be angry that we had not done something to protect ourselves. We would be angry, legitimately, if the Americans were to treat our soil as the killing ground for incoming missiles and anti-missile missiles. We would be upset to find that Vancouver, or even the interior of British Columbia, was a possible target for directing things that you wanted to dump. What comment is that on First Nations' property? Do we owe no one anything in the form of defence against this threat?
Hurtig appears chiefly upset that, thus far, the defence mechanism has found our failures. Do we have anything to contribute to make them more successful? Perhaps not, but do I know? Do you know? Can we be there to offer whatever it is we can offer? Is that not what you do for friends? When friends need help, they do not look at your credit balance and assume you are too poor to help. They would like some help, perhaps just a place to dump their semi-burnt furniture as they clean out the house after the fire. Why not make that kind of offer? It does not have to be more expensive than we can afford. The Americans may be intent on ruining their own economy, but I think we can protect our own.
Senator Munson: Are you saying that you do not have an issue with American radar systems on our terrain?
Mr. Morton: I did not when they were there to protect us from Soviet bombers. Why would I be now when they are there to protect from rogue-state missiles?
Senator Munson: How real is that threat when others within the American military are saying that perhaps the emphasis should be more on barges along the U.S. coast with short-range missiles rather than what we are talking about now? Obviously, it is a divisive issue in our country.
Mr. Morton: All issues of defence are divisive in the United States, for the same reason they are here. Various interests within the Pentagon have been fighting a war ever since they entered West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs against the other two to four groups. The United States military is a very conflicted organization, as you all know. If the navy can get its version of anti-missile defence in, it will do so. Doubtless the army has something of its own that it would like to do. Therefore, it is difficult to deal with the Americans when they are having one of their inter-service spats, and it is impossible to find a time when they are not. That is part of the reality we have come to understand as we have worked more closely with the Americans on defence policy issues over the past 30 to 40 years.
Senator Meighen: I want to follow along the line of questioning opened by Senator Munson. Let us consider North America for a second, leaving aside the rest of the world and any obligations we might have there. Obviously, our chief challenge, if not our chief obligation, as you were discussing a moment ago, is to help, in our own self-interest, the Americans in the defence of North America. One always asks, as Senator Munson did: What can we do in that regard? You took up the question.
Given the size of our military today, and probably tomorrow, and given the perceived responsibility for our military outside North America, it seems to me the best thing we can do to help the Americans is to get them to a state of mind where they are no longer “worried” about the northern border, which they seem to persist in being worried about, rightly or wrongly. Let us say that we had $100 to spend in North America on defence, broadly interpreted. How would you react to the thesis, which I would not say is mine necessarily, that we take 80 of those dollars and put them toward border questions, both in terms of the security of the border as well as in terms of our own self-interest in the economic sphere, that is, ensuring the border does not close down for physical reasons, such as lack of processing facilities, bridges, or whatever, and also that it does not close down because the Americans perceive a threat coming from the north? Then let us say that we put $15 toward some area of traditional defence, whether it be the navy, the air force or whatever.
That is a rather long-winded way of asking: For more bang for our buck, and in our own self-interest, should we not spend more money right now with, perhaps, greater public support and no need to generate it, on border matters rather than military matters within North America?
Mr. Morton: You raise a very important point. Historically, preserving American self-confidence has been the basis of our own security. That is to say, they were not frightened of us and we did not have to be frightened of them, which is the Macdonald theory. Obviously, I will stick to that theory as long as I possibly can. One obvious problem is that we have to depend on the rationality of our neighbours not to get too excited about threats that may not be as great as they want, or threats that are, perhaps, expanded for political purposes.
We also are dependent on the quality of their judgment of the world, and I think most Canadians, rightly or wrongly, figure this is not the most brilliant period in American world management or perhaps even domestic policy management. Certainly the people who advise me on my wretched investments tell me this is a terrible time to be in the United States and to get out, although their advice to go to China alarms me a little, because I do not think they know nearly as much about China as they do about the United States, and what they know about the United States, as I said, is always limited by God's refusal to share her knowledge of what is coming.
You were right. It seems to me that back in 9/11 it was not 9/11 itself that troubled Canadians but 9/12, when the border clanked shut and our economy seemed destined to go down the tubes. That still troubles me, and if there is a border security dimension to that, obviously we should be doing something about it.
I was struck at the time that the Chrétien government, which was not spending notoriously generously on security and defence matters, suddenly had $2 billion to lay on the border, because they saw the priority, they recognized that Canadians did, and $80 out of $100 seemed to me not a bad reflection on Canadians' continuing priorities. How to increase border security past a certain point, I do not know.
I came here today grumbling about my Swiss army knife experiences. For years, I dealt with my fingernails with a Swiss army knife on the end of my key chain. Our airport security was based on the assumption that someone could easily hijack an airplane with a Swiss army knife. I must say that in the history of terrorism that would be a Victoria Cross achievement, but nonetheless it was there as a fear, and I have lost a couple at Dorval to that purpose.
That, of course, underlines to many fellow Canadians that security can be silly as well as significant, and that is a threat you do not want to get too far into either. You can make security look ridiculous by making it ridiculous. Some of that has happened. I will not say it is Swiss army knife style, but it has happened.
Also, security can be an alibi for economic interests that do not want Canadian products to compete with theirs. It is pretty hard, so far as I can understand the science, to accept the BSE threat as a justification for the kind of boycott that the Canadian cattle industry has suffered. The Canadian softwood lumber case is so complicated that I have lost the ability to sit still long enough to hear the full complexity of it, but again, I think these are powerful interest groups that, in the Washington context, simply have more influence than the Canadian counters do.
Again, I am suspicious when security issues justify what seem to me unfair trade issues, and I am sure you have thought about that too.
However, why not be in discussion with Americans about where their priorities are and where ours are? I have great reservations about American priorities to provide more infantry troops to various unpleasant places in the world where they want to be involved and I do not think necessarily we have the interest in being, because I know how Canadians will respond to significant casualties for insignificant purposes.
When I see a government moving away from our more sophisticated equipment to provide rather unsophisticated and unprotected forces to serve American interests, I tend to hold back a bit. Human beings count a little more heavily for me than do new electronic technologies in which Canada has a possible contributing role and where we should be putting what money we have. We are not an unsophisticated country.
Senator Meighen: I turn now to Canadian Forces in the international sphere. Keeping in mind your absolutely correct assessment of reviews as being perennially wrong, if you were designing our forces, and if we have taken care of whatever we had agreed upon with the Americans for the defence of North America and now we perceive an international obligation, what is your view on whether we have international military obligations, on whether they are in our national self-interest and on whether it is important for us to ensure, other than on strict humanitarian grounds, that there is peace in Bosnia? Are we doing that only so that the conflict there does not grow into a worldwide conflagration that will ultimately touch Canadian shores? What kind of forces do we need for that? I suppose it is obvious that we need flexible forces with the ability to get there otherwise than by taking a slow boat to China, which we do not now have. Where are our interests in getting involved? We cannot get involved in every conflict that flares up, although we have tried to. How should we choose?
Finally, how did we succeed in getting absolutely no credit in the United States for the very considerable — given the size of our armed forces — involvement in the Gulf and in Afghanistan? We put a great deal of what we had there and we got absolutely no credit. Was it due to the alleged lack of chemistry between our Prime Minister and the American president at the time, or was it due to other factors?
Mr. Morris: Historians are ill-advised to answer questions that close to the present. You have heard the argument that we have not yet seen the documents, and we have not. I think Americans are highly preoccupied with their own role in the world and their own contribution to world change and do not have a great deal of media space left over for anybody else. If you were go to Great Britain, which has made a significant contribution to the Iraq war, you would find that the British resent the fact that they are not front and centre in the American media for their contribution, yet on a day-to-day basis you can find evidence in the American media, certainly in the Eastern media, that the British are there.
All allies in all wars have wanted more credit than they ever got. In the war I deal with most, the First World War, in 1918 we finally got major credit in the British media because we were fighting in the last 100 days. After the war, one of the motives for the many riots that occurred between British and Canadians in England was that the Canadians had been hogging the credit. You can get into trouble for getting credit, though even then it was smaller than most Canadians thought we were entitled to. A century later it looks rather more excessive than we were entitled to at the time.
How do you balance out credit? How do you balance out what you will lead with in the morning paper? It is a problem and not easily solved. Allies have this infinite appetite for praise and an ultimate revulsion for any criticism whatsoever; so, suck it up, as they say. Do not expect very much.
The future is unpredictable and developing skills is difficult. I mentioned submarine warfare, which Canadians say we do not need any more. How do you know? Our Victoria class submarines are good quality, pre-nuclear-powered submarines. Some of the rogue states have them as well. I do not know if Libya still qualifies, but it has conventional submarines, as does North Korea. The Americans do not. The Americans are trying to rent a conventional-style Swedish submarine so that they will have one at their Honolulu submarine base on which to practise.
Is this a wicked thing for Canadians to have available?
I suspect it is a useful thing to have available since the Victoria class are excellent of their type. They are not the most modern. I would have been happier if we had gone the route that Perrin Beatty and his advisers wanted to go, but we did not, and we still have a contribution to make.
In general, I say we should keep as many skills alive in the Canadian Forces as we can. We do not know which ones we will need when it comes time to use them. For example, people tell me there is now, to my surprise, a war on terrorism. This is a kind of political phrase. It has no juridical meaning whatsoever. In fact, it complicates the juridical scene, as we have seen with Guantanamo.
I will leave you with another competitor of possibilities. You may have thought about it already. I happen to have a friend in Kingston who is a former colonel in the People's Liberation Army of China. He is quite a convert to Canada and regards the PLA as full of all sorts of problems, but he does tell me regularly by e-mail about the slightest hint of news of trouble in the Taiwan Straits. There is a war which I hope no one in this room was thinking about until I mentioned it, but it is a possibility. It is a horrible possibility, particularly when you think of China's possession of most of the American foreign debt and the economic leverage that country is acquiring daily, minute by minute, it sometimes seems, if you believe my advisers. Also, it has a substantially modern army with a lot of attitude and a lot of need to maintain face reflected in everything from Tiananmen to the Taiwan situation. All it would take to create a crisis in that area would be an organized campaign to tell Taiwan that it must become a more dutiful province of China, and that crisis would involve the United States. Would the Americans go? Could they go? Do they have the resources for a two-front, two-world war? What is Canada's position? The Chinese are a significant part of our immigrant population. How do they feel about that issue, on either side? How would Canadians feel?
One thing about Canada has come home to me since the Gulf War. During the Gulf War, I was principal of the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus. I was sitting there quietly one day when a delegation of Iraqi students arrived to ask me, the military historian and their academic boss, why their country Canada was attacking their country Iraq. One of them I had had the odd chat with, and I knew his dad had been tortured and managed to escape the Saddam regime, so I asked him, “What do you feel about this?” He said, “Of course I hate Saddam, but Baghdad is the greatest city in the world. It is the centre of civilization.” I thought, well, we could have two opinions about that, but whatever. It was not a two-opinion question for him.
Canada is full of people who have many loyalties. You know that. In 1914, it was full of a great many Canadians who had British loyalties, many of them because they were recent emigrants and many of them because that is where their roots lay. Other people had rather slimmer French roots, though that was less obvious at the time. We went to war in 1914, I will argue, and I do so publicly, and in 1939 because this was fundamentally, for many of us, a British country. The Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was anti-war himself, was an anglophile with a deep emotional commitment. We were going to war; he knew it; he prepared us for it.
That seemed all right at the time, but now there are all sorts of Canadians who have hyphens after their names that link them to somewhere else in the world about which they feel as intensely emotional as our English-speaking British or French ancestors felt. That is one of the complications of making defence policy. If CNN shows it, and it is your country, you feel strongly about it, and these kids from Iraq, most of them pretty hostile to the Saddam regime, felt strongly about their country. It was not a surprise to me that there would be a civil war in Iraq after the American invasion, because Iraqis want their country back. It may be silly, stupid, ill-guided, terroristic even, but it is perfectly predictable. Those kids reminded me of that when I met them in 1991. I had to assure them that Canada was not doing very much to Iraq. It might like to, but it could not. We sank a gun boat, which was not a bad thing to do in a day's work, but that was it. The complex reality of a multicultural, multinational, multi-hyphenated population out there is a factor in making defence policy just as much as the geography of a country.
Senator Mercer: Welcome, Mr. Morton. I want to go back to one of your earlier comments about Perrin Beatty and how he was amazingly wrong. You did preface that by telling us that he was your student, so I am assuming he was not that good a student.
Mr. Morton: He was a very able student, but set up against God's ability to hide the future.
Senator Mercer: You skirted around what I call the great Canadian inferiority complex. We tend to beat ourselves up because we are not as good as we would like to be or as big as we would like to be or as mighty as we would like to be. I have a difficult time with this. Even given the well-equipped and large American Forces, you read articles and headlines about parents trying to protect their sons in Iraq any way they can — the 351st needs protection — or collecting bullet-proof vests for use in Iraq. I suggest it does not matter what we do in military preparation, because if we do not know where we are going or what we will face, whatever we are prepared to take with us is probably not the right or the best equipment. The Americans find themselves driving around in Iraq in vehicles that cannot withstand landmines, so they are putting old bullet-proof vests on the floors of these vehicles to protect the troops.
Another question relates to a topic that Senator Munson raised, which was missile defence. What is your opinion? Should we be participating in the missile defence project? Can it work, and is it too costly for us?
Finally, you used the word “obligation” in your discussion of North American defence. What do you think our obligation is? Is it just to provide a place for training our allies' personnel, because we are blessed with such a vast land mass, or do we need to participate in what some would call a more meaningful way?
Mr. Morton: Is any army ever prepared for war? Usually not, and certainly not when they have not had a serious war for as long as we have, because it is something you forget how to do. Armies learn pretty quickly. The Russians have learned a lot in Chechnya. We have been spared those experiences except to the degree that we can learn from our allies.
Learning from your allies is an extremely useful thing to do. It is cheaper than sharing in those lessons. That is why it is good have allies, to take advantage of their knowledge, to adapt as best you can, and as I said earlier to Senator Meighen, to have as wide a variety of skills as you can possibly afford and not just throw skills away because they will not be useful in the short run. That is hard to do because keeping up skills costs money. You do not necessarily have to have a lot of the newest equipment; you do have to have some, and you gain experience in using it experimentally. You do not have to have a full kit, in other words. You can have examples; you can buy a few and test them out.
One of the virtues of having a regionalized country and regionalized military, particularly the army, which operates in three hermetically sealed vacuum tubes I sometimes think — Valcartier, Petawa and Wainwright — is that you can do things in one place, not necessarily in all of them, and you can keep skills alive.
In the Korean War we had forgotten how to patrol. It was the most important part of that war and we were very poor at it, despite telling ourselves we were wonderful. The more you tell yourself you are wonderful, the less likely it is that you are. That is something that some hockey and football teams could perhaps digest. Keeping those skills alive is possible and should be a higher priority in any defence policy simply because of the uncertainties and unknowns of any such policy.
What should we do about American missile defence? I do not have a list but I have a suggestion, that we go to discuss what we can do for them and what they can do for us instead of ignoring it and hoping it will go away. I suspect some of that discussion has been going on. I have talked to some people. What they say to me is confidential and I will not share that here. You can get it yourselves, to the degree that they want to share it with you. That discussion has probably occurred more in officers' clubs than in committee rooms. However, there are ideas out there.
What is our obligation? I think it is to do the best we can to ensure our allies understand we are onside. It is not comfortable to be onside when a leadership's population, for good reasons or bad, does not feel confident. It is like going to war with generals who seem elderly and incompetent. Our armies have gone to war under that scheme. It is part of life. You wish you could do better, and by the end of the war you will do better because those people will be fired. However, you have to accept that and accept the propaganda, because the media is saying these are the most wonderful people since Napoleon. That is life. You wish they could do better, but as I have said, unless you want to become an American you cannot get a vote in an American election. Forget about it then. Get used to whom they elect and make the best of it. You make better allies if you treat people as friends rather than contemptible enemies.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: It has been very interesting to listen to you this morning. My first question is totally frivolous. As a historian, I wonder how you have concluded that God is a woman.
Mr. Morton: It gets their attention.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: That is not a complete answer, but accepted.
I want to ask, seriously, whether you think we pay enough attention to the opinions, the knowledge and the experience of our military leaders. I ask this question after spending many hours with military leaders at Gagetown, which you did not mention when you mentioned the three silos. You mentioned three bases but did not mention Gagetown. As a New Brunswicker, I picked that up. I am impressed with our military leaders' level of intelligence, study and qualifications. I sometimes feel that they are not listened to enough in terms of whether we need to do more and how we should do it, especially with regard to domestic and international issues.
I should have the latest polls in my head, but I do not. Perhaps it is because we have just had November 11, but I sense that Canadians are more in favour now of greater support of the Canadian military than they have been. I do not know whether that is true but I would like your opinion.
Mr. Morton: My mother is a New Brunswicker from Saint John and I was raised there during the war. I know about Gagetown, which is a base designed to break down those three separate, regional silos reflected by our three regular regiments. I remember telling a New Brunswick Minister of National Defence that he should do something about reorganizing the army so it was not broken down that way. When you have a small army anyway, to break it into three separate parts culturally may be an extravagance. Gagetown is the base that tries to do that and I do not know if it succeeds.
Do we pay enough attention to leaders of the CF? I said earlier that people who cry wolf a lot do not get much attention. That is the whole purpose of that famous fable. If you go out crying about dangers that never happen, people lose faith and respect for you. It is the misfortune of Canadian generals, as of security chiefs generally, to tell Canadians that they live in a dangerous, risky world for which they have to pay money to protect themselves. Canadians do not, after all these years of a blessed existence, share that apprehension. That is a political reality.
For the past few years I have been going to talk to the new generals of the Canadian Forces, the newly promoted brigadiers, commodores, chief warrant officers, the new leadership, and I say, “You have to overcome your aversion to politics, you have to start realizing that if your goal is to retire to being a senior officer in Ottawa, you have a lot of learning to do about political processes, about how to make arguments, about how to make friends in the bureaucracy.”
I was told of a security conference in Ottawa organized by Agriculture Canada, which interested me. There are some security interests that Agriculture Canada is deep into. They had invited Health Canada and other departments. The names have changed so often lately I forget them all, but most of the departments were there except National Defence. How come you did not invite DND? They did not want to come. Why? Too busy.
As an occasional visitor to Ottawa, there does not seem to be a shortage of people with gold braid on their shoulders walking around. Is there so much to be done in the George Pearkes Building they could not spare a captain or a lieutenant to go over there and listen, and maybe during the coffee break have a chat? Apparently they could not. Too busy — too stupid, because that is where you make your political contacts, not with honourable senators here necessarily or with MPs, but with the people in Ottawa who are part of the departmental structure. You get to know how those departments work and who matters.
Our generals are insufficiently politically trained to understand the machinery of Ottawa. They spend most of their careers as far away from it as possible. This is bizarre because their goal and ambition in life is to get three or four maple leafs on their shoulders and end up in Ottawa. If you are training all your life to end up in Ottawa, you should include as part of your training understanding Ottawa.
We do ignore the military chiefs and we are missing a lot of common sense and wisdom. However, they are missing the chance to be here, to be influential and interesting, because they are not preparing themselves either. I give them hell when I can, particularly the new ones who are still trainable. The ones who get to the top are the ones who cause no trouble, who will not make waves.
Another thing I learned from Doug Young's committee is how you get promoted. You get promoted by never causing any possible disturbance. People talk to me about how so-and-so had a bit of grey in him. What do you mean by “grey”? Well, there was something he did at some point, we do not even know what it was, but it caused some controversy. It turned out in one case an officer on his way up had fired his adjutant. Should he have fired him? Probably, but it was done in such a way that there was a grievance. Of course there will be a grievance. The adjutant does not want to be fired. Does that surprise you? It would be crazy if he did not file a grievance. There was controversy. It seems to me that that is something you want in a general, somebody willing to fight for principles, not to cause trouble.
Is that not what soldiers are supposed to do, go abroad and cause trouble? Yes, but that is over there, not here — not in the chain of command. Maybe that is the problem. I know lots of really able officers.
Years ago, when there was an entity called the Canadian Forces Staff School for captains, I used to go to lecture them on Canada and on Quebec. It was delightful, because I got frank, angry, articulate discussion. I used to send other colleagues from the University of Toronto because they would get a different impression of Canadian army officers. I also lectured at the Canadian Forces Staff College at Armour Heights. It was very boring because in the back rows sat the directing staff, deciding these people's careers, and they were looking out for troublemakers. They did not want to be troublemakers. I asked what happened to these guys in between being a captain and becoming a major. Did the spirit get drained away somehow? It seemed to me to be wrong. It is a question that troubled me deeply and I am delighted that you raised it because I do not think it is all our fault or all your fault.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: The Canadian public, that was third.
Senator Mercer: I have some question about your thought that the senior military people are not very political. This is the one department in government that, when there is a conflict between the department, the military and the minister, in successive governments — and you as a historian could study this easily — they are very quick to kill the minister. Historically, over a number of governments in my lifetime, ministers of National Defence have been politically killed by their own department because envelopes have come out of there that create embarrassments that the minister must live with and which he probably did not create. That minister has become expendable because they have not been able to get what they want from him. They are very political in their ability to dispose of unwanted ministers.
Mr. Morton: Who are the “they”? The trouble with plain brown wrappers is that you do not know who sent them. What has also marked National Defence, at least since the early 1970s and the Macdonald reforms has been civilianization. I am not sure the people who serve this political role are necessarily the military, because often the ministers who are serving the military interests are the first to go. There is complicated politics inside the Department of National Defence. It is has been redesigned by the Macdonald era reform to ensure civilian voices are heard.
It is a complicated department to run because of the tribal system and all the competing interests. I have mentioned the Pentagon — it is just the same in the Pearkes Building: different interests supporting different causes all locked up together, with different career paths and branch loyalties, different equipment programs, all fighting hard but ineffectively, and often without detailed political experience or Ottawa experience. The word “politics” suggests a big “P.” In using “partisan,” I am talking about managing Ottawa briefs. Many of the military people say to me that they get a decent minister and he is gone by the time he started taking a knowledgeable interest in this.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: To pick up on what Senator Mercer said, I do not think I was talking about political involvement. I was talking about people in the decision-making process going to the experts, not necessarily in international relations, but in military development, planning and preparedness, et cetera. It is like the daycare issue. We have gone to the daycare community to involve them fully. I was not talking about politics, although it is a different angle and an important one. The other one is shift in public opinion. I do not know about the reliability of the polls. I do not know the latest poll; I am sure Senator Munson would.
Mr. Morton: Some recent polls that I have seen, which are inspired by defence and pro-defence-oriented groups and I have the suspicion that they are the product of their own makers, have indicated Canadians are more aware of the limitations of their Canadian military representation and are eager to do something about it. The problem is always what are you willing to sacrifice for this? When I address groups about the defence issue, I take a look at the group and define it. One of the ways we can raise money is to cancel medicare for people in the last year of life. That is where most of the spending occurs. Why do we not save that money? You have been keen on spending lots of money on defence. Here is a good way to find it and not increase the deficit. If it is a financially oriented group, well, let us forget about the deficit and borrow. That is what Bush is doing. There is a model for you. If you like George Bush, you must like deficit financing. Pick a group. Why do we not force students to pay the full costs of their education, then we would have the money. When you put it that way, when they are not unloading the cost on someone not in the room, they become more cautious. They become like the cabinet, which represents all sorts of interests that do not want money spent or do not want money spent on anyone but themselves. That kind of complication is important to bring into the equation. Any one abstractly will say, “Yes. We should have more military and modern equipment; whatever we think should be done.” There is a price. It costs over $100,000 for one of those pairs of boots that the Prime Minister promised during the last campaign. That is not wages. It is what it costs to feed, keep, buy a rifle for and ship the soldier somewhere to the other side of the world to do it. It is so expensive that the Americans can no longer find the money to do it.
Senator Atkins: Professor Morton, picking on something you said to Senator Munson, you talked about the U.S. economy and that it could go sour but we have to protect our own. Are we not dependent on the success or failure of the American economy?
Mr. Morton: Definitely, but we are not in a controlling role in that economy. I presume the present government would say it had set an example in good financial management that the present U.S. government maybe inherited but has not been able to carry on with. To the degree they have unloaded their debt on the Chinese and created a huge deficit, we did not have much influence on that, although we are blamed for it. It is a problem, as you will have realized from your own investment awareness.
Senator Atkins: I think since 1994, the budgets for defence have been flatlined, at best. Do you think that was a wise policy of the Minister of Finance and the government? There is no way of catching up now, even if you address a conventional kind of military.
Mr. Morton: There is a way of catching up. As I have said, you have various ugly trade-off policies. I make them as simple as possible so that whatever audience I am talking to can grasp them. When you talk about raising the hundred billion dollars that it would cost today to bring our forces back, that is real money. I remind them of a fact that has escaped most history books. During the 1950s, under the St. Laurent government, half of all federal spending was devoted to national defence. This is one of those things that somehow passed us by.
During that period, people complained that the Liberals did not fulfill their 1945 social welfare promises. They did not, because they were financing the Cold War. At that time they did not do badly, comparatively, by old age pensions and hospital insurance, which they established in those years, but they did not bring in the medical care insurance plan that was part of the 1945 national security program.
However, they rearmed the Canadian military. They expanded it to its largest size ever in peacetime. Everything about the Canadian Forces today is really still influenced by that 1950s period, including the married quarters that were built with 1950s-style houses at most Canadian Forces bases and all the radar stations. Most of the bases date from the 1950s. Gagetown, certainly, was purchased and built, and all the permanent buildings at Petawawa, Valcartier, Wainwright, and Calgary, formerly, were built in that period. We forget that and so do they.
When it came to rearming again in the Trudeau years, it was piecemeal and patched because there was never the will to spend that kind of money. Flatlined? The government will tell you national defence has had the biggest increases of any of the budgets. You understand statistics better than I do and how easily this can be said. I just know there has not been enough to make it over, and every year the deficit in replacing equipment that dates back 30 or 40 years becomes larger.
Also, it is not easy to replace. Let me tell you my little 8 Wing story. I am the Honorary Colonel of Canadian Forces Air Force Base Trenton 8 Wing, the air transport wing. We fly Hercules C117s. They date from the 1960s. They are older than the pilots flying them. They are not unlike a certain helicopter we have heard much about. The manufacturers of the Hercules want us to by new ones. They have a new model, “stretch” Hercules. They are not the Hercules my people tell me we need, but they would be new. The air force wants them. “Stretch” Hercules, like stretch anything, can carry more bulk; they cannot carry more weight. They cannot land in the places the old, shorter Hercules could land. However, they are not building those any more. Other countries are building aircraft like that but we are stuck with Hercules. That is what the Americans would like us to have.
Do we really want them? No, we would like to rebuild the old 1960s version. They are the best we have ever had for our needs as Canadians. We cannot get them.
There is something else. We cannot get them because they are sitting on the tarmac at Spar Aerospace in Edmonton, the contractor for replacement. They are there because they are short of technicians. They are short of technicians because they are proudest of their contract with the U.S. Coast Guard. They have the Coast Guard repair contract. That is their priority, as you would understand.
What about us? Do we have a penalty clause? Yes, but we have been warned by Spar that the day we start talking about the penalty clause, they will start recruiting our technicians at Trenton. We are short of them as well, because we are also trying to keep a base going in an unnamed United Arab Emirate that I shall not mention, which you all know. Perhaps you have visited it.
We are caught in a bind. We want an aircraft renewed and cannot get it. We do not want the replacement because it will not be as good for us. Tell me how I should tell my colonel to get out of that dilemma.
Senator Atkins: We need a crystal ball.
Mr. Morton: If that is the solution you raise for this problem, that is a good one. Every time Mackenzie King put his faith in the crystal ball or the magic table, he was wrong. He asked them the night before the British election who would win. Gladstone and others would appear and tell him what he wanted to hear, and usually they were wrong. As you know, the British Liberal Party disappeared into middle distance. King learned not to trust the table rappers, but they are comforting.
The Chairman: Professor Morton, I would like to thank you for appearing before the committee. Crystal ball and all, it has been of great assistance to us.
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The committee adjourned.