Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 9 - Evidence, January 31, 2005 - Morning meeting
SAINT JOHN, Monday, January 31, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 10:30 a.m. to examine and report on the national security policy for Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I call the meeting to order. Welcome. I would say, on behalf of the committee, that we are delighted to be here in Saint John today. I would like to welcome those of you in the audience to the first hearing that we are having in the city on national defence review. My name is Colin Kenny. I chair the committee. I will briefly introduce to you other members of the committee.
On my immediate right is the distinguished senator from Nova Scotia, Senator Michael Forrestall. He has served the constituents of Dartmouth for 37 years, first as a member of the House of Commons, then as their senator. While in the House of Commons he served as the official opposition defence critic from 1966 to 1976. He is also a member of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
On my far left is Senator Norman Atkins from Ontario. He came to the Senate with 27 years of experience in the field of communications. He served as the senior adviser to Robert Stanfield, Premier William Davis of Ontario, and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He is also a member of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Beside him is Senator Tommy Banks from Alberta. He is the Chairman of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, which recently released a report entitled The One-Tonne Challenge. He is well known to Canadians as a versatile musician and entertainer. He has provided musical direction for the ceremonies of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games, is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has received a Juno Award.
On my right is our host senator, Senator Joe Day from New Brunswick. He is the Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, and also of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs. He is a member of the bar of New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec, and a fellow of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada. He is also a former President and CEO of New Brunswick Forest Products Association.
Beside him, we have Senator Pierre Claude Nolin from Québec. He has chaired the Senate's Special Committee on Illegal Drugs that issued a comprehensive report calling for the legalization and regulation of cannabis in Canada. Currently, he is the Deputy Chair of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration. Internationally, Senator Nolin is the Vice-President of the NATO Parliamentary Association and Assembly.
We are very pleased to be in Saint John today, in a city with such a proud military tradition. Saint John is home to HMCS Brunswicker, 31 Service Battalion, 3rd Field Regiment, 1 Company of the Royal New Brunswick Regiment, and 722nd Communication Squadron, of which the committee's own Senator Day is the honorary Lieutenant-Colonel. I should be calling you ``sir.''
Thousands of young men and women from this region have served in two world wars, and Korea, and have continued to serve in peacekeeping and peacemaking missions ever since.
Our committee is the first Senate committee mandated to examine both security and defence. The Senate has asked our committee to examine the need for a national security policy. We began our review in 2002 with three reports: the Canadian Military Preparedness in February, Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility in September, and an Update on Canada's Military Crisis: A Review from the Bottom Up in November.
In 2003, the committee published two reports: the Myth of Security at Canada's Airports in January, and Canada's Coastlines: The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World in October.
In 2004, we tabled two more reports: National Emergencies: Canada's Fragile Front Lines in March, and recently, the Canadian Security Guide Book, 2005 edition.
The committee is reviewing Canadian defence policy. During the next few months the committee will hold hearings in every province and engage with Canadians to determine their national interest, what they see as Canada's principal threats, and how they would like the government to respond to those threats. The committee will attempt to generate debate on national security in Canada and forge a consensus on the need and the type of military Canadians want.
Our first witness today is Dr. Marc Milner. He is the Chair of the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick and the Director of UNB's Military and Strategic Studies Program. He received his doctorate from the University of New Brunswick. Dr. Milner is the author of numerous books dealing with Canada's naval history and has co-edited and co-authored several books on Canadian military history and many scholarly articles. He was formerly employed with the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and wrote portions of the second volume of the RCAF's official history.
Dr. Milner, welcome to the committee. We understand you have a short statement, and we are looking forward to hearing from you.
Mr. Marc Milner, Director, Military and Strategic Studies Program, University of New Brunswick: Thank you very much, Senator Kenny. Thank you all for the opportunity to appear before you this morning. I have a fairly short statement. It is not prepared in the sense that it is polished. I have some ideas that I think some of you are already aware of.
I was asked to talk about the nature of the development of the Canadian defence policy. What I wanted to suggest to you — and this is an idea which the UNB program put forward last year at the Security and Defence Forum in Ottawa, which was sponsored by ADM (Pol) — is perhaps a new way of looking at the nature of Canadian defence policy.
Traditionally, Canadian defence policy has been threat based, or based on our commitment to treaties and obligations overseas, whether it is NATO, NORAD or the UN. This has been an easy sell, I think, to Canadians in time of threat. Certainly, my experience in dealing with young Canadians in the university environment has been that they understand perfectly well the need for Armed Forces when there is a clear and present danger. During the Cold War that was perhaps the easiest sell of all.
We go back a little through the course of Canadian history and, as many of you will know, the process of defence preparedness has been up and down, depending upon the threat. It has been an old saw in Canadian military history that not only did we not prepare for the last war, we do not prepare for any war. That may be true historically, but since 1945 we have maintained a pretty impressive level of preparedness, certainly through the Cold War, unprecedented in the previous period of Canadian history since Confederation — certainly the first of half of the period. Canadians have responded generally to a threat base. We need Armed Forces because there is some kind of external threat. We need Armed Forces because we have a commitment to NATO. We need a brigade in Europe. We need forces for Standing Naval Force Atlantic. We have aircraft committed to central air group. They bought into these more or less as a requirement.
There has also been a tendency to look upon defence as somehow treaty based. We have an obligation to provide forces to NATO. We have an obligation to provide aircraft to NORAD. We have an obligation to provide ships for Standing Naval Force Atlantic under NATO.
What I would like to suggest to you is perhaps a new way of understanding the need for defence. Dr. David Charters and I presented a paper last spring in which we talked about the need for national strategic assets. Whether we can use this as a way of selling a defence policy to Canadians or not we will have to see. What we suggested is that Canada, in a mature state in its relations with NATO, and with its partners in North America and in the UN, has to bring certain assets to the table as a partner in the community of nations. However, the government also has a responsibility to Canada to actually provide certain national-level strategic assets that could be used to fight floods, or, goodness knows, if it snows in Toronto again, you could deploy the army to clear the snow.
Despite that somewhat trite remark, there is a requirement at the national level for certain strategic assets, and there has been some articulation of this, obviously, although perhaps it has often not been put in those terms. The way we described it was as follows: That you can work, if you like, from first principles. There is a requirement for effective policing of Canadian territory. Whether that is done by UAVs or Aurora aircraft, there is a basic requirement to make sure that Canadian sovereignty can be sustained and Canadian coastlines patrolled effectively. I know the air force is in the process now of trying to decide how many platforms are needed and what the nature of those platforms might be in the future, but there is a basic requirement to do that.
There is clearly a basic requirement for some kind of tactical airlift. It may be at the operational level, and goodness knows, my students are always telling me that we need to buy huge aircraft. I do not fall into that category necessarily, but the government does have a requirement for some kind of tactical airlift, both fixed wing and rotary, and that probably means replacing the C-130 fleet and having some kind of heavy-lift helicopter, so that forces both within the country and deployed overseas can have those as a national asset. Those are useful for sustaining operations in theatre overseas, but they are useful for flying sandbags to Winnipeg, actually doing local recovery operations or providing the kind of national strategic asset you might like for some kind of domestic operation.
Therefore, if you work back from that kind of first principle, do we need a navy and what sort of navy should it be? I would suggest to you, given my interest in naval history, that clearly we do, and we need to provide that coastal surveillance. The navy has traditionally provided for the Canadian government a first responder.
You can go back, certainly, to the Korean War, but perhaps earlier still, and see that very often the first asset that the government is able to deploy in some kind of crisis overseas is a frigate-size vessel that can deploy, in our case, globally, and it has given the federal government tremendous reach and cachet to be able to say, ``We can get people there, we can participate.'' That is a national strategic asset. It buys you friends outside the country, as I am sure you well know.
The army clearly needs to be deployable, and what form that would take and how large it might be would have to be for the defence review to determine. As a rule of thumb, most of the people I travel with would tell you that at a minimum, a deployable brigade that is sustainable overseas is a target toward which this country should move, but that is a matter for debate. Battle groups and combat teams and whatever also have their functions.
The way we think that the whole defence debate needs to be pitched is that the government requires certain assets, certain things in its pocket that it can use nationally for its own internal purposes, for domestic crises, for natural disasters or what have you. Obviously, it needs to have assets that it can bring to the table when talking to our friends and allies outside the country.
To me, it is very illustrative that, if you look back at the Second World War experience, Mackenzie King's initial defence and foreign policy was to fight as little as possible and spend as much money as possible in building industry, in supporting operations, building the British Commonwealth Training Plan and building escorts for the North Atlantic, which would not get us involved in another catastrophe like the Western Front in World War I. However, by 1943, when Mackenzie King began to look for influence within the Alliance, people began to ask, ``How many boots do you have on the ground?'' Not how much money are you spending, but how many of your nationals are you prepared to send in harm's way to actually make this work. I firmly believe that it is nice to be able to deploy NGOs, it is nice to be able to send money, and nice to be able to send fresh water and food and all those good things, but in areas where it gets particularly nasty, what really counts are the number of people you are prepared to deploy in harm's way to make somewhere a safer place, and that means defence policy.
Let me conclude with two general comments following through from my last one. One of the things that bother me in the debate that goes on in this country is that the issue is often portrayed as, do you want defence or do you want health care? To me, defence is a primary form of health care. If Roméo Dallaire had had two mechanized battalions in Rwanda, 800,000 people would still be alive. That is fundamental health care.
If you talk to people who have been in Afghanistan, they will tell you that tens of thousands of people are alive there today simply because there were people on the ground providing stability. You know as well as I do that you can follow that line of reasoning to almost any place Canadian Forces have been in the world in the last 50 or 60 years. It is an elementary form of health care. It does not perhaps resonate in the same way and provide you with an MRI in your local hospital, but it does make the world safer and allows conventional health care to actually function in places where societies have broken down.
The final point I would suggest to you is that one of our problems, and perhaps we can pursue this in the discussion, is that our Armed Forces are so small, so remote, that I believe they are fundamentally disconnected from Canadians. Most Canadians do not know anybody in the Armed Forces, could not tell a Canadian soldier from anybody else's soldiers, and simply have no buy-in to the Canadian Armed Forces. It is something that government does. The Armed Forces do not belong to us, they belong to them, and I am not sure how we fix that, but I have some suggestions.
The Chairman: Well, thank you very much, doctor. It is a very provocative closing that I am sure the committee members will take you up on.
Senator Banks: Well, finish that last point, please, doctor. How do we fix that? The reason I am asking the question is that I come from Edmonton, which has a large military base, and Edmonton has embraced that northern base and regards it as a cogent and very important part of the community, which I think might be the model that you were referring to and that maybe everybody else needs to aspire to. How do we fix that if it is absent in other places?
Mr. Milner: Well, at UNB we published a document several years ago and appeared before a committee in which we suggested that one of the ways you might fix it — and this is not popular with the army, and Gen. Hillier will not be happy to hear, perhaps, that at some point the Armed Forces, the army in particular, would have to carry the can for this one — would be to mobilize local militia units on a rotational basis for deployment overseas.
In other words, if you built in a schedule — we now have nine infantry battalions — if you decided that in fact a third of those would actually be militia units on active rotation, at some point you would designate the 1st Battalion of the Royal New Brunswick Regiment to go operational two years from today. You would have a plan whereby you would build up to a state where 1B NBR would then, either through local recruiting or augmentation — the reserves now augment the regulars — under this scheme, actually augment the militia. At some point, that battalion would then be operational for two years and would be liable for whatever operation actually came up. That would allow a buy-in to the local media and the local community. In Fredericton's case, perhaps it is not a good example, because we do have the same kind of affinity for the army that you have in Edmonton, but that would allow the people to see sons and uncles and daughters and friends who are oversees with the unit, whether it is in Afghanistan or wherever they happen to go, and if you had a schedule whereby these units became active and operational for two years, deployed overseas and then came back and were demobilized within their community, and you had a reception and a parade, there would be some real buy-in.
The argument that has always been presented against that by the regular force people is, of course, that they are extremely busy and they want highly professional soldiers because they do a much better job than poorly trained reservists. Therefore, there would have to be an appropriate period for training to an operational level, and there would have to be augmentation, obviously, in some key areas. People might find that if they are in the RCR, they might temporarily have to re-badge into the West Nova Regiment for a tour overseas.
We are just trying to find a way to create a kind of footprint in the larger community, so that, for example, you would not necessarily always see the units from places with which you have no contact. It could actually be your local militia unit that at some point gets tagged for that operation.
Senator Banks: Your answer has raised a lot of questions that I know a number of my colleagues will want to pursue with you.
You said before that it was easy for people to understand the purpose of Armed Forces when there is a clear and present danger — somebody is banging on your door. When that is not happening, when nobody is directly threatening us, what are Canada's national interests? What should be driving the determination of the nature of our Armed Forces and what their point and their plan are? What are Canada's national interests that should determine that?
Mr. Milner: That is a question I am supposed to ask my students. What are Canada's national interests? Clearly, sovereignty is one. I am a great believer in policing our own territory, and you can take that right back to Trudeau's emphasis on sovereignty. At the risk of being cynical, in many ways, the most direct and real threats to Canadian sovereignty come from our friends, not from our enemies. It is a creeping kind of threat. Do we control the 200-mile economic zone? Is our claim to the Arctic as firm and as solid as we would like under international law? Do we have proper a presence there? Can we actually deploy forces there if there is a crisis? Now, there is some debate about that, and units have been trained over the years as first responders to crises in the Arctic. Do we have the tactical air-lift to actually get them there if there is a crisis, with a nuclear-propelled submarine using Canadian territorial waters? Those sorts of things bother me enormously. I think it is in our national interest to demonstrate both a will and a capability to effectively police our own territory. I am not sure we are there with the Armed Forces we have.
Externally, we do live in a community of nations, and that community of nations has interests. Although we perhaps do not always share exactly those interests at any given time — and I think we were wise not to get into the war in Iraq — we are interested in the same sorts of things as the European Union is interested in and other countries are interested in, which is peace, stability, freedom, free movement of trade and goods and, as much as possible, people and ideas. We share that interest, and I think if the community we are travelling with has decided that it is important to stabilize Afghanistan, then we have an interest in being there, and we have obviously demonstrated that.
I do not see this as the end. I spend much of my time teaching the military history of the Western world, literally from Plato to NATO. In many ways, we are ``back to the future.'' We are back to a pre-Westphalian state system, where the prospect of failed states and crises around the world is not diminishing, it is actually growing. Therefore, I do not see Canada's interests as simply limited to making sure everything is safe at home, because we are a trading nation, a nation of immigrants, and we have broad interests.
Therefore, we want peace and stability. It is a kind of cliché, but I buy into that because I think it is true.
Senator Banks: You used the words ``navy'' and ``coastal surveillance'' in the same sentence.
Mr. Milner: Yes.
Senator Banks: We, or at least I, and I think some of my colleagues, are of the opinion that that is oxymoronic. The navy does not do coastal reconnaissance, unless we have been ill-informed. Who does?
Mr. Milner: Well, that is a good question. Who does coastal surveillance? I assume the air force does it with Aurora patrols, but I stand to be corrected. Who does coastal surveillance? I do not know. Does anybody? The Coast Guard? No. Buoys and markers?
Senator Banks: The Coast Guard does aids to navigation and safety activities that are really important, but they do not do intelligence, as far as we know, as far as I know, at least. The Coast Guard does not do surveillance in the sense that I think you meant it, in the sense of protecting sovereignty, do they?
Mr. Milner: No, I do not think that is their mandate, sir.
Senator Banks: Therefore, is anybody minding the shoreline?
Mr. Milner: I do not think so.
Senator Forrestall: Why did you not mention the Coast Guard?
Mr. Milner: I have no simple answer for that. I suppose I have tended to focus my research and interest on the armed services.
Senator Forrestall: We have the Halifax Rifles, we have an equal group here in New Brunswick, but they need conveyance. I just wondered why you did not.
Mr. Milner: Well, I have always thought of the Coast Guard, just as the senator said, as sort of buoys and markers and aids to navigation. I know that there has been a traditional debate about the role of the navy and the role of the Coast Guard and why do we have an armed Coast Guard. We have an armed fisheries protection service, I suppose.
Senator Forrestall: I will come back to it.
Senator Day: Dr. Milner, I would like to explore a little the footprint-in-the-community concept. I am thinking of when we were at university, and there was — and I have forgotten the acronym — a university training program for students that was cancelled a number of years ago. Do you see any interest at the university level or within the Armed Forces in reinstituting something like that, where our educated and educating students would become aware of the Armed Forces, and therefore continue the knowledge of what those forces are doing throughout the world?
Mr. Milner: My instinct would be that there is interest there, for a number of reasons. One of them is that students are really anxious about summer employment. Students are always looking for jobs. The minimum wage certainly has not anywhere near kept up with the costs of university. Therefore, I think there is a potential pool there of active and interested young Canadians who might well be drawn into a reserve officer training program or Canadian officer training corps. One of the things that we suggested several years ago with respect to this is that somehow, the Armed Forces need to overcome the complex and almost Byzantine process whereby people join, and make it a more open and welcoming sort of institution. I have had students — admittedly this was in the 1990s, and it may not be true today — who grew old waiting to get into the Armed Forces, and who gave up and went to Australia and other places.
UNB may well be unique. We have had a modern military history program on campus for many years. In fact, the program that I now run dates from the collapse of the COTC program. That was the program that universities were given in replacement for the officer training program. We are chairs of military history, so you can still study the material on campus.
I think UNB has a good affinity for the idea of having a military presence on campus. We often have serving officers in our undergraduate and graduate courses. I have never in all the years I have taught at UNB found people picketing outside my classroom for teaching military history or for having people on base. I think the potential for some kind of system whereby you could be in the Armed Forces, you could be trained, you could have an option to serve for a couple of years, a little help with your tuition, which is extremely expensive, and a summer job that would supplement that, is enormous. However, when we suggested this to the current forces, they are so busy simply trying to manage the problems on a day-by-day basis that their reaction is, a) it is going to cost too much, and b) we cannot organize it; it is just not feasible. I think there is tremendous potential for that.
Senator Day: Okay. Now, we learned two or three years ago — it was probably after September 11, 2001 — that National Defence Headquarters sent out a directive to their officers and members not to wear uniforms in the community because they thought that they would become targets. In other words, let's hide our identity. Do you have any comments on that? Are you aware of that situation?
Mr. Milner: I had not heard that about Canada. I certainly have been familiar with it in other places. I have travelled quite extensively in Britain, for example, where even wearing a navy blue blazer with a crest on the pocket caused people to tell you to take it off and fold it over your arm. Ironically, the only soldiers I ever saw in uniform in Britain were actually Irish soldiers coming back from a UN mission overseas. I never saw British soldiers in uniform.
There is a possibility, I suppose, of that kind of situation developing, but I would think it is minimal and rather unfortunate.
I do not think our Canadian Forces should hide. I think they should demonstrate their presence.
I certainly have had occasions, in running a graduate seminar, where a group of students, not all of them sympathetic to the issues of the military, were joined by someone who had just spent hours rappelling out of a helicopter at Base Gagetown and arrived all muddy and in his combat fatigues. It creates a really stimulating seminar when people can talk to a practising soldier about his problems.
My students have always been extremely welcoming of that. Every year we try to put about 45 undergraduate UNB students on a bus and take them out to Gagetown to witness the annual fire demonstration, or whatever the training exercise is in the fall. There are two reactions that strike me as being interesting, quite remarkable.
The first and most telling reaction of every student was that ``Gee, these guys are really bright and articulate,'' which strikes me as a little odd, because that suggests that there was an expectation that they were not. Some of my informed judgment, if you like, about Canadian perceptions of the Armed Forces comes from sitting on the bus and listening to students who have had their first real contact with soldiers and are struck by how normal they are. Why they would think they would not be, I do not know.
The other reaction is that they are really struck by how professional they are, and how competent and skilled. I have never had an instance where, having taken a bus load of undergraduate students out to the base for a demonstration, they have come back without being utterly exhausted, smiling from ear to ear and talking like magpies about what they saw, how interesting it was, and how satisfying to talk to real soldiers performing real activities. All of which suggests to me that there is a real residual sense of goodwill, but the ignorance is profound. They have no contact on a day-to- day basis with soldiers, even in Fredericton.
Senator Day: National Defence is not doing anything to promote itself in that regard when they say, ``Do not wear your uniforms.''
Mr. Milner: I think you are absolutely right, yes.
Senator Day: I heard your comments with respect to militia call-up and doing a regular tour with the Canadian Armed Forces. Have you any other thoughts about how we will not get back too quickly to a large military force? Hopefully, we will be able to encourage the government to increase that slowly, but we have been told that it will take quite a while. We will not get involved in mandatory service, so how else will we increase this knowledge of the Armed Forces and the important role they play in our society?
Mr. Milner: Well, I suppose the short answer is through an increased role for the reserves, including the one that we suggested years ago, of actually defining periodic operational tasking for reserve units, whereby they actually do become operational and deploy overseas. That is perhaps one way of providing a footprint and a buy-in for Canadians, so that the people who are overseas are people they know.
Senator Day: As part of that, are you recommending a significant increase in the number of reservists?
Mr. Milner: I would not think it would be significant. I am not very knowledgeable about the state of the reserves. I know there are some reserve units that are barely getting by and some that are quite strong. However, if you were to go to a system of reserve call-out by unit on a rotational basis, you are probably not looking at more than 3,000 or 4,000 people annually. There would have to be some shuffling, so maybe by the time you are actually doing the run-up for one and are bringing one down, it might be a few more. However, off the top of my head, I would have to suggest that we are talking about less than 10,000 people, and probably fewer than that.
Let's face it, our army is already tiny. You could put the entire combat arms personnel in the Air Canada Centre and still have lots of room left over for the air force operational people. Most people do not understand that. They do not realize how few spear carriers there really are in the Canadian Armed Forces. I would see increasing the number of spear carriers in the short term.
Senator Forrestall: Doctor, I just want to go back for a moment or two, if I may, to the coastal defence of Canada. In trying to look ahead, as opposed to looking back — because God knows, it has been a bucket of worms in the past — how do you see us best doing this in the future? The Americans have been the most insistent; so insistent, in fact, that it would lead me to suspect that we will have significant changes in our White Paper on defence. There are a lot of items that we cannot deal with until we see the forum review itself, and that is proper.
Mr. Milner: Yes.
Senator Forrestall: How do you see us doing this? It is an enormous task to patrol the Great Lakes, the great rivers of Canada, our coasts.
Mr. Milner: Yes, absolutely. I know the Armed Forces are currently wrestling with unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles and one thing or another. That is clearly one way to go, with an increased use of remotely piloted vehicles.
I have been a quiet advocate over the years, as a naval historian, of a smaller coastal fleet to augment the blue water navy. I have tended not to trumpet that very loudly in naval circles because I am likely to have the hounds of hell come after me.
As you know, the way Canadian defence policy works, the navy says that for the cost of, say, 16 patrol frigates, we could get 18 perhaps slightly less capable vessels that we could put reserves on and do patrols off Labrador, and if we ice-strengthen them in the summer, we could occasionally put people up there, have a presence, train reserves and provide jobs for university students. They will immediately tell you that if they put in a proposal for, instead of six general-purpose frigates, 12 or 15 less capable vessels, the government will buy six less capable vessels and that will be it. It will be over. The way our procurement process works, the navy is driven to the high end. From what I have seen, it is perfectly understandable.
However, there has to be somebody covering the area between the blue water navy and the inshore, and it always struck me that that would be a good role for the reserves. I do not think the current MCDVs do that job. They are too slow and not as seaworthy as they should be. Their endurance is not what it should be. I think there is some space between the navy and the shoreline where a demonstration of some form of a naval presence is certainly possible.
I understand that we are planning to reduce the number of Aurora platforms available to the air force from, I think it is 21 now, to 15, get rid of three of the newest airframes and basically scale back. I think that is a bad idea.
We had occasion to take a group of students to visit the air wing at Greenwood last spring, and the initial reaction of the students was, ``Where are all the airplanes?'' We flew in and landed at the air base and we did not see any airplanes. We had been told beforehand that this is Canada's largest air wing and busiest base in the maritime patrol. It was only after we had been there for an hour or so and went behind one of the hangars that we saw actually three Auroras on the tarmac, a C-130 and a rescue helicopter ready for immediate use.
I do not know how you can effectively patrol a coastline as long as Canada's and do the overseas deployments that we do, even with the Aurora, with 15 airframes. When we arrived on the base and talked to the wing commander, he had two operational aircraft available for the whole of the area, I assume from Ellesmere Island to George's Bank, and one of those was doing pilot training, doing touch and go, so he had one actual deployable aircraft.
Now, in fairness, most of these aircraft are actually in Halifax, undergoing maintenance to try to bring them up to speed, and they had several aircraft in long-term rebuild. However, the entire East Coast maritime air group was basically down to about two aircraft. It just beggars the imagination. We asked the commander about his search and rescue aircraft, and of course, he said most of those airframes, the C-130s, had been deployed overseas, the hours had gone up on them and they were pretty well beaten up. At that point they were having tail rotor problems with the new EH101, so he only had one aircraft that could fly. The students were just flabbergasted and did not know how to handle that. They just thought we had an air force.
There are all kinds of possibilities, but they require investment, and we just have not done that.
Senator Forrestall: The direction that we are going in might indicate that it is the will of the government — and it will be reflected in the forum paper when it is released — that the time for the army to come to the fore is here, that this will be it, period, for the next 10 to 15 years. Rather, I am saying, given what we have been doing, it may be necessary.
Mr. Milner: Well, it may be necessary, sir, but as you well know, if you build up the list of things that need to be replaced —
Senator Forrestall: I did not want to ask you directly.
Mr. Milner: Well, Canada tends, unfortunately, to engage in boom-and-bust defence spending cycles. There is a tendency in this country to say at some point, ``You have your piece of kit, so do not come back for a generation. Hope it works for you.'' If you do that often enough, what you end up with, as you well know, is an accumulated deficit in capital procurement. The air force, from what I can judge, is in a crisis state. As someone who works in naval history, I know that we are already about halfway through, as I understand it, the operational life of the Canadian patrol frigate. If we had, forgive me, a sensible system of replacement, we would be looking at what we plan to do with the blue water navy now, and I am sure there are people in Ottawa who are thinking about that. However, the lead time for the development of the Canadian patrol frigate was about 15 years, and we would have to start now if we wanted to make sure that by the time those ships reach the end of their serviceable life, there was a sensible plan for replacement. We tend not to do that, as you well know.
When I worked on navy history, people talked about how long it had taken to replace the Sea King helicopter; they began to work on that in 1977.
Senator Forrestall: Yes, tell me.
Mr. Milner: Right. At one point, I told an interviewer in Halifax that I did not think I would see a replacement in my lifetime. I think if I can get through the next decade, I could probably see it. It is typical Canadian defence, and not to get cynical, at times it is genuinely bizarre. Is it the army's turn at the trough? I am not sure what that means. Army capital programs tend to be a little smaller. If you are buying an air force, it is enormously expensive. There is only one occasion that we have actually bought a navy off the shelf, and that was under William Lyon Mackenzie King in the 1930s. Every other time that we have tried to build or create a navy, there has been tremendous domestic buy-in, and the only way I think you can sell fleet procurement is to make sure that it is built domestically and the largesse is spread widely. I am not sure we have a shipbuilding industry left that could do it, so you would have to build that up.
Senator Forrestall: You are not sure that we have the trades, you mean?
Mr. Milner: The trades as well. The boom-and-bust cycle makes it extremely difficult to do more than support the army over the short-term, but we certainly like to dig ourselves into a deep hole over defence.
Senator Forrestall: Then you would subscribe in a general way to the combat-ready land, air and sea force concept?
Mr. Milner: I think that is a minimum requirement. I often hear, among my colleagues in particular, ``Why can we not just train them for peacekeeping?'' I am sure you well know one of the reasons that Canadians are such tremendous peacekeepers is because they are simply very professional soldiers. Working at UNB and being close to Gagetown, we get to see these people fairly often. They are good at what they do, and I think that makes it much easier for them when they get on the ground.
I had an officer in to speak to a group of my students. We were talking actually about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the big debate was do you drop the bomb; we got talking about Truman's decision to drop the bomb. We had a colonel who had commanded a company in Bosnia attend the seminar, and we were talking about that and some other things. The students wanted to know if soldiers were trained to wound people, and he said, ``Not my soldiers. They are trained to shoot the centre of the mass. You cannot be second-guessing what the other person will do.'' At one point, the students looked at him and asked, ``So if Harry Truman said that we can either drop the atomic bomb on Japan or we can send the army ashore, and the casualties among American troops would be heavy, but it would be morally superior to do that over the bombing, what would you recommend?'' He looked them coldly in the eye and said, ``How many is too many? One of my soldiers is too many. If you can drop the bomb, you drop the bomb.''
There is that kind of cold realization that there are basic military requirements, you have to have people who are prepared to actually do that, and that gives you the entire scope of the issues. If you train people to be sensitive, new- age soldiers and dress them in Day-Glo orange, they will get bullied. They will not get the respect they need where they go. I firmly believe that if you have the ability to do the worst, you have the whole range of other options available to you; and it may not be pleasant. It is often not nice, obviously.
Senator Forrestall: Let's say in the absence of a bomb threat that what you are suggesting is perhaps the best route to go, and I am not sure that I disagree with you at all. Thank you, professor, very much.
Senator Nolin: I want to pick up on part of the answer you gave to Senator Banks on Canada's international role. As you know, our Prime Minister, in the wake of President Bush's election to a second term, recently talked a lot about international involvement. Also as you know, there is a foreign policy in the making in Ottawa. How do you see that policy evolving? I will have a follow-up question.
Mr. Milner: Well, I preface my remarks like most professors, saying I am not a specialist, and then I will talk about it at some length. We have often articulated this to our students, the big Canada versus the small Canada, if you like. Will we stay at home and scold our friends for being nasty, or will we actually participate in the world? Will we get involved in the —
Senator Nolin: So a bigger role?
Mr. Milner: Yes. I do not see Canada withdrawing. I think we will stay involved. I think our foreign policy interests oblige us to participate in NATO, to participate in the UN. I do not see us withdrawing from the international community. My bet would be that the foreign policy review will describe us as a member of a community of nations in which we have an interest and in which we want to be an active participant. I would see us as being interventionist, which is why I think this idea then of having national strategic assets that we can bring to the table, so we can actually deploy the forces when and where needed, or support NGOs or whatever it is that you happen to do, is important for Canada.
Senator Nolin: Therefore, the more we look into the new mandate of NATO and moving outside our traditional frontiers, the more you would support an expanded role for the Canadian Forces as part of those new mandates?
Mr. Milner: I do not know if ``expanded'' is the word I would use. I think that we are pretty much on a —
Senator Nolin: Well, that is not exactly across the border of Germany.
Mr. Milner: No, no. I have supported out-of-area operations in the past. It is a cautious role for NATO, but I think NATO is the right venue, for want of a better term, for Canada. I am, like most Canadians, and perhaps most Canadian academics, very anxious about bilateral arrangements or unique, one-offer arrangements with the United States. The Americans are best handled in a group, as you well know, and I think through NATO or the UN is the best way to proceed. Ad hoc coalitions operating under the American aegis make me uneasy, and always have done.
Senator Nolin: I want to come back to the Americans and the defence of North America. How do you see our role? You have mentioned the blue water defence, but how do you see that being organized and operated? What is our role there?
Mr. Milner: Well, we do have arrangements under NATO and the Canada-US Regional Planning Group to share in the defence of North America. I am firmly of the belief that we need to defend ourselves from ``help''; that we need to demonstrate sovereignty and capability in Canada, so that if we do need to ask for help from our large neighbour to the south, we can be quite specific about how that help should be delivered and under what terms and conditions.
As Desmond Morton said years ago, ``Most Canadians understand instinctively that Canada is both indefensible and unassailable.'' The only real threat we have to our sovereignty, when you get right down to it, is, with all due respect, our friendly neighbour to the south. However, if anybody else attacks us, we could actually just sit back and they would defend all of North America, but I do not think that we want that kind of passive role.
My students are quite animated over the whole business of ballistic missile defence. That is a subject of considerable debate. We had the minister there last week actually, and BMD was one of the issues the students questioned him about. The Americans will do it; they are doing it. We have a choice of either participating or just allowing them to do it. It is not a happy circumstance, but from my perspective, it is important to keep NORAD going. It is better to be inside the tent rather than outside. I think our choices are stark.
Senator Nolin: While we are talking about the continent, let's talk about the North. Should it be one of our major roles to defend the North? Of course, my question is hiding the word ``sovereignty'' from our neighbour to the south.
Mr. Milner: ``Defence of the North'' is probably the wrong term because it is not clear there is any real, direct threat to the North.
Senator Nolin: Well, sovereignty threats.
Mr. Milner: I spent some time as a young man working in the Arctic, had a chance to travel around it and was thoroughly enamoured of the experience. I am not completely convinced that simply doing it in Canadian colours and drawing a line around it actually carry a whole lot of weight internationally. I think presence and demonstration of sovereignty are really important, and the Armed Forces are uniquely placed to be able to do those sorts of things. They need not be on a large scale, but they should be routine and fairly high profile.
Senator Nolin: More than the rangers.
Mr. Milner: Yes, absolutely more than the rangers. My students did get really animated about that little island over which the Danes have claimed sovereignty. About a year ago, they launched a ``Stop Danish Imperialism Movement'' on campus, which briefly caught the attention of the media.
Senator Nolin: A member of NATO, by the way.
Mr. Milner: Yes, I know.
Senator Nolin: Just to help the solution.
Mr. Milner: All our threats are from our friends.
Senator Nolin: Yes.
Mr. Milner: Years ago, an article in Canadian Defence Quarterly argued that the real danger we face is the threat of unwanted help, and that is a hard sell. After all, the whole debate, as one historian, and I think it was Barry Hunt, late of the Royal Military College, said, most Canadians forgot that the real objective of getting nuclear propelled submarines in the late 1980s was not to stop the Russians, but to find out where the Americans were. However, you cannot sell that. It is extremely difficult to sell the concept that we acquired nuclear subs so the Americans will tell us where theirs are not.
Senator Atkins: Thank you, professor, for being here. I am curious. Where were your students on missile defence? Were they more in favour or less in favour?
Mr. Milner: They are in two groups. It is probably fair to say that the historians, who would be described as academics, as realists, were of the opinion that ballistic missile defence was much as I described it — the Americans will do it; it is not, currently, the weaponization of space, it is NORAD in a different guise, and if they are intending to do it, we should buy in to it. We should be part of the process. It is probably fair to say that the people who study foreign policy, particularly the people in the political science department, were not enamoured of ballistic missile defence. As a group, the undergraduates were split almost evenly between those who acquiesced to the idea and those who were opposed to it, largely on principle.
Senator Atkins: Do they understand that what the Americans are asking for is a radar defence system?
Mr. Milner: No, there is virtually no understanding of what it entails. They have heard the media talk about the weaponization of space, space-based systems, and that is the level at which they understand it. As one of my colleagues pointed out yesterday, space-based sensor systems have been used for military purposes for 40 years or more. This would be a variation on that. If the Americans do at some point plan to put weapons systems in space, then I think we will have a crisis of conscience and we may well —
Senator Atkins: We are not there?
Mr. Milner: We are nowhere near that. It is my understanding, although the media have never said it, that the Americans have asked for nothing from us. They do not want bases, they do not want money and they do not want equipment.
Senator Atkins: They wanted a radar warning system.
Mr. Milner: Yes, but not necessarily in Canadian territory.
The Chairman: On their soil?
Mr. Milner: Yes, on their own soil, so it is just a buy-in. Will it be run by NORTHCOM or NORAD? I think in Canadian interests, it would be better if it was run by NORAD.
Senator Atkins: You are a historian?
Mr. Milner: Yes, sir.
Senator Atkins: Were you more or less in agreement with the white paper of 1994?
Mr. Milner: I would have to dodge that question because I am not intimately familiar with each of the white papers. I apologize. If you want to pursue it, the last White Paper on defence talked about general purpose military capability? In that sense, yes.
Senator Atkins: Which really came out as a proposal for a conventional military?
Mr. Milner: Yes. There is a lot of talk about the military not being, if you like, adaptable and not changing, and that came up in the meeting of the minister this week with students. It has been my experience that the Armed Forces are in a constant state of adaptation and change. Unless you decide at some point that you will do a kind of radical surgery, like Gen. Hillier, you will stay the course with the general capabilities and not talk about high-ends, so probably the decision to remove the tanks ultimately was an understandable one. However, we will not do that kind of heavy lifting anyway. Therefore, an Armed Forces that is capable of rapid deployment in a general kind of military environment and can do work within the coalition, I think is the way to go.
Senator Atkins: You mentioned in your opening comments our obligations internationally. Do you think we are spread too thin? Do you wish to comment on that?
Mr. Milner: I would have said in the 1990s that we were spread far too thin. I think, given the manpower in the army in particular right now, we are certainly spread far too thin. I can give you some anecdotal evidence of that.
Over the years, we have traditionally had good contacts with the people at Base Gagetown. They are only about 14 kilometres away from the university, so there was a fair amount of traffic between our military and strategic studies program at UNB and the people at the base. Students went out, officers and NCOs came in. Beginning in about the middle of the 1990s, and especially since the late 1990s, the traffic has virtually dried up. When you talk to people at the base, they will tell that they either just got back from a deployment, or they are going on a deployment, or they have been tagged for a deployment and now they are preparing do their training, or their battalion will be doing training, or they have been away from home for so long that they do not really want to do anything outside of nine to five if they can get away with it.
There is a real sense of fatigue, certainly among the people with whom we deal at the base, and a sense that they have just been driven far too hard for far too long.
Senator Atkins: So your answer is yes?
Mr. Milner: My answer is yes. I cannot speak for the air force. I know the navy would say that — too few personnel trying to do far too much.
Senator Atkins: It was at Camp Gagetown that the Prime Minister first announced that they were planning to increase the Armed Forces by 5,000 personnel. Do you think that was enough?
Mr. Milner: It is the bare minimum. It is my understanding that it will just fill out the empty cadres in the infantry, combat arms units, and give the navy and the air force a few people to play with, but it is pretty minimal. I cannot speak with a great deal of precision on this, but my sense is that we have almost reached the critical stage in terms of personnel, where almost everybody is tied up administrating the infrastructure, the bases, the personnel and the supply, and that we could add on, if we wanted, combat capability. We could add on spear carriers, if you like, at minimal infrastructure cost, because we have already reached the stage where we are basically down to people who are running bases with very few combat soldiers, very few sailors available for ships, that is, people who can go to sea, people who can join the infantry battalions. We probably have a lot of scope already there without a big infrastructure cost. However, I am not a specialist on that.
Senator Atkins: You are aware that in our first report we recommended that the forces be increased to 75,000?
Mr. Milner: Yes, I recall that, senator.
Senator Atkins: And also that the budget should be increased, initially, by $4 billion? Do you care to comment on the budgets of the military?
Mr. Milner: No, no. I understand from talking to senior officers that they are inadequate, but they will also tell you that if you gave them $1 million, $100 million or $1 billion today, they probably could not spend it. The lead time for a lot of this is quite long. Obviously, the budget needs to increase, and the rate of increase should be enough so that, just as Mackenzie King said in 1939 when the war started, ``We will give you what you need, but tell me what you can actually spend.''
Senator Atkins: Yes, but do you believe that?
Mr. Milner: I cannot say.
Senator Atkins: If we were faced with a national crisis, you do not think that we could find a way to —
Mr. Milner: To mobilize a larger number of people?
Senator Atkins: Yes.
Mr. Milner: Oh, I think we could, no question. I think the cadres are there in the militia units, I think the cadres are there in the Armed Forces.
Senator Atkins: It is the infrastructure?
Mr. Milner: Our infrastructure may be aging in a lot of places, but what we are missing in a lot of the infrastructure is people in it — empty buildings and nobody in the units. At least anecdotally, there are not enough people to man all the ships and fill out all the billets in the combat arms units. Therefore, an increase to the Armed Forces of 5,000 is pretty minimal. It could certainly go larger.
I cannot foresee any global crisis over the short term that would require a mobilization comparable to anything that we have seen historically from the two world wars, from Korea or from the Cold War. I just do not see that happening. However, we will see what happens with China as it emerges as a great power.
Senator Atkins: My final question: Do you think they made the right decision on buying the Sikorskys?
Mr. Milner: No. The original plan for the aircraft replacement was to do away with a number of airframes, a number of training systems, a number of spare parts systems, simulators, and to buy one airframe, one power plant, one training system. I would suggest that the reason we did not do that is entirely political.
I think the original idea was sound. We will now have a ship-borne helicopter that is different from the rescue helicopter, which means we need two parts teams, two training teams, two simulators and two maintenance systems, but at what cost? I understand that the Sikorsky contract came in under the EH101, but I would like to know what the overall costs, considering all those things, would be for the two programs, bearing in mind that we have already squandered about $1 billion in the helicopter process. It is a very Canadian way to procure things.
Senator Meighen: Welcome, professor. Sorry I arrived late. I only have a couple of questions, but please stop me if you have already answered them.
Just to follow up on Senator Atkins' last question, do you think it is possible to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the additional costs involved in having two distinct helicopters in service over a period of 10 years, let's say?
Mr. Milner: I am sorry, I am not an accountant or an economist, but universities and businesses are full of people who presumably do exactly that every day. I would bet you could find someone in business who will tell you what the cost of two systems is.
Senator Meighen: Yes, I suppose you would have to know what the average replacement costs are in a year.
Mr. Milner: Yes.
Senator Meighen: We will have that information pretty soon.
Mr. Milner: Certainly it made sense to me, when the original plan came out, that if you are planning to have two aircraft flying over the ocean, you might as well have one airframe, one power plant and one system of maintainers, and then you just train people to the sensor suite.
Senator Meighen: I realize that all you can offer, perhaps, is anecdotal evidence, but it seems that increasingly, politicians, at least in this country, are wont to follow rather than to lead. You could make the argument that for a long time, the lack of action on the national defence file has been perfectly in concert with public opinion.
Mr. Milner: I would agree with you 100 per cent. We have the Armed Forces that we want.
Senator Meighen: Yes.
Mr. Milner: Absolutely.
Senator Meighen: Do you see any change?
Mr. Milner: No.
Senator Meighen: Notwithstanding Afghanistan?
Mr. Milner: No.
Senator Meighen: No?
Mr. Milner: No. I think the constituency for the Armed Forces is virtually non-existent, and maybe I have been jaundiced by talking to people in the army, but they would tell you that public support is a mile wide and an inch deep. As soon as someone says, ``Do you want a helicopter or do you want an MRI?'' it is over. Everybody wants health care, and that is perfectly understandable, but you would expect leadership, presumably, from the government's senior politicians in saying that we have to do both.
Senator Meighen: One of the important factors in perhaps influencing public opinion, of course, is for those who know what they are talking about to speak out, and the people who know most about what they are talking about are the people in the military, but they are constrained in what they can say.
Mr. Milner: Yes.
Senator Meighen: We have had some very preliminary information before this committee that in other jurisdictions — the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, I think — there is a different regime at play and that military people are expected, if not encouraged, to speak out on military matters. Are you familiar with those differences at all?
Mr. Milner: No, but I have heard a lot of complaints, both inside the forces and outside, over the way information is managed within the Canadian Armed Forces. The general consensus among people both inside and out is if you just let the soldiers, sailors and airmen talk —
Senator Meighen: Let alone the Chief of the Defence Staff.
Mr. Milner: Well, we can talk about that. However, just letting them talk is far better than having a public affairs officer interceding and telling them what they can and cannot say.
On the whole, they are really bright people. They are well trained, generally well educated. You can trust them to talk to the media, and if at some point they cross the line, then there is a process for handling that. Generally, what has happened, from what I can judge, is that that kind of initiative has been crushed by the need to have properly filtered information coming out, which has not always been successful.
Senator Meighen: Well, we intend to get to the bottom of it and see what differences there are, if indeed there are some, between us and our NATO allies and try to encourage some more frank discussion.
It was only, to refer to another area that Senator Atkins touched on, when we asked a specific question that we discovered that notwithstanding the undertaking to provide 5,000 additional troops and 3,000 militia, nothing has happened because no money has been voted or allocated for that — nothing, not a cent.
You can understand that the public probably thinks ``Well, good, they have increased the Armed Forces by 5,000 and the militia by 3,000.'' Not so. There has been no movement whatsoever, and we are told that it will take a number of years, even if and when the money is provided, to complete the recruitment and training.
Mr. Milner: Well, it brings me back to my earlier point. I do not think you were here, but I did comment that some of my students have grown old waiting to get into the Armed Forces and have gone elsewhere. I wrote in an article in the Canadian Military Journal that it was probably easier to join the Jesuit order than to join the Canadian Armed Forces.
Senator Meighen: I have never tried the former.
Mr. Milner: Well, neither have I, but it just seemed to work well stylistically. I have had students in despair who have since gone to Australia and other places, or joined the RCMP because they could not get into the Armed Forces.
Senator Meighen: You probably touched on the navy's role, since, as I understand it, the navy is your area of specialization.
Mr. Milner: Yes, sir.
Senator Meighen: Assuming that you supported a blue water role for the navy — which you may or may not, I was not here — this committee has been on record, I think, as offering some support for the concept of arming the Coast Guard, to which there are pros and cons, of course, and we are far from any decision in that regard. However, if the Coast Guard were armed, in your view, would that relieve the navy of any tasks that it is now supposed to cover off or does cover off?
Mr. Milner: Well, after our discussion with Senator Banks, it is pretty clear that no one is doing that job. No one appears to be playing that kind of close inshore policing role, sovereignty role. For the navy, as I mentioned before, it has always been rather problematic. Given the way the Canadian defence procurement system has worked, if you say, ``Well, we can get by with less,'' the government will generally give you less. If you say that you want six CPFs, but can make do with 12 or 15 slightly less capable large ocean-going vessels that could do inshore policing, fisheries protection, surveillance and presence and all that kind of useful activity, the government is just as likely to give you six of those. Therefore, you always try to maximize your needs. I suppose the theory is, much the same as the army's theory, as long as you have the full range of capability, you can do with less. If you have a minimum capability, it is the only capability you have. All armed forces operate that way, not just the Canadian. In the Canadian system, they have always been driven to maximize the bang they can get for the buck. If you suggest that they might perform a Coast Guard role, something less, they tinker with that and with the MCDV, but I do not think it is a particularly capable platform for that kind of job.
Yes, I think there is a significant gap there between our deep water, blue ocean navy that actually has a global reach that is quite remarkable for a country our size, and what happens off the coast.
Senator Meighen: Thank you for answering questions twice, professor, I appreciate it.
Mr. Milner: It is my pleasure. It is better the second time, I think.
The Chairman: Professor, you mentioned in your opening statement the concept of periodic operational tasking with militia units. I would like you to walk the committee through how you think it might work. Pick what ever you want — the 3rd Service Battalion or the 3rd Field Regiment. How many people do they have now, approximately, 100, 120, 150?
Mr. Milner: I honestly do not know.
The Chairman: Okay. The honorary colonel says a little under that.
Now, if you said that two years from now, you people will head off on an overseas tasking, what would your guess be about how many would stay in the unit?
Mr. Milner: Or how many would bolt, right?
The Chairman: How many would decide that they have a shop to run or a job they want to keep or whatever? Tell me about how you would plan for the drop in personnel. Then go through for the committee how you would then build up the personnel and get them trained.
Mr. Milner: Well, I think you raise a really telling point about a reserve call-out. I would not dodge the bullet on that by any means.
When David Charters and I thought this one up, our expectation was that while the local unit would carry the local flag, if you like, there would be, obviously, some loss because people cannot deploy or will not deploy or do not want to go on active duty, so you would then provide, on a regional basis, an opportunity for a reservist to augment that unit. If you are planning to go operational, say, in two years, that means that probably in a year from now, you would have to begin recruiting people full time into that unit.
If, for example, it was 1R NBR or the 3rd Service Battalion, you would then draw from other service battalions in the region, in the brigade, or in Maritime Forces Atlantic and augment that, and then at some point, you would have a cadre, perhaps, of peripatetic Armed Forces service personnel who work with the reserve units or could get tasked on occasion to augment those reserve units. Then you would gradually build it up over that one-year or 18-month period until you had full strength and had conducted your training. I confess that it is perhaps at this stage a half-baked idea, but we were trying to find a way for a named unit, for example, the Lincoln and Welland Regiment, the Algonquins or the South Albertas or wherever they happen to be, to be in the news at some point. The Globe and Mail would have a picture of the 1st Battalion, Royal New Brunswick Regiment, doing its thing wherever the Armed Forces happen to be, and there would then be some plan for constant local media contact and for bringing the unit home and demobilizing it in its home station.
I admit that there are serious problems with how you would manage this. I would not minimize them, which is probably why, whenever we mention it to the army, they recoil in horror and run.
The Chairman: Well, I absolutely commend you for turning your mind to ways to connect with the community. That is something that this committee thinks about a great deal. Having said that, I would be curious to know if you, some of your students or some of your colleagues have thought through the practical problems and whether it means people will have to take three years out of their lives to go on that assignment, or whether it is a two-year commitment, and whether, in fact, if you did it on a regional basis, it would work. The names of the regiments you have mentioned are illustrious. They have wonderful histories. They are part of our culture and the things that we are proud of. However, if you intend to try to re-create that, you need to make sure it will work.
Mr. Milner: Yes, absolutely.
The Chairman: It has to fly and it has to fly well, and part of the deal is that the leadership has to come from the unit, and so on and so forth.
Mr. Milner: One of the possibilities — because we talked about a kind of Canadian officer training corps at universities — would be to tie this in with funding people within the university community for reserve training, and then once they get their undergraduate degree, they could go operational for two years, have a little adventure and then go into the workforce.
The Chairman: Okay. You led right into my next question. One of the biggest complaints that we get from the commanding officers of militia regiments is that they have a number of people who are terrific employees for four years. They show up once a week, they have a summer job, they graduate and then they are off; they go somewhere else. I have had a number of militia officers say to me, ``We are at the point now where we are really looking for people a little older who are settled in the community, and from whom we can get some payback from the training that we will give them. The students that we have see it as a good ticket to get through university, an interesting job, fun to do, but once they graduate they are gone.
Mr. Milner: Well, my reaction would be — and I understand the concerns of people trying to build units and find the senior NCOs and the officers they need — what you also end up with, as a result of that process, is a cadre of Canadians who have some military background, who have some training and some empathy for the problem. They have four years of experience and then they go off and get married, have a career and do what they do, but what you have in the end is not a completely lost soul. My students do not know the difference between a battalion, a platoon, a brigade and a division, and most of my colleagues do not. People hear on the news about a Canadian battalion, and they say ``Well, how big is that? What does that do?'' The basic information at least is out there in a cadre of people.
The Chairman: In fairness, the size of these units seems to be changing in the army fairly rapidly these days and I am not surprised there is some confusion.
Mr. Milner: We could make an argument that it may be a little rough on the 3rd Service Battalion to have people pass through every four years. Would it not be better if you had a bigger throughput, so that everybody who goes through as an undergraduate has a chance to spend the summer at least finding out what the Armed Forces are about and some of the problems?
The Chairman: I am not dismissing what you are saying. One of the concerns of the committee is to find a way to build a coalition of support in the community. Your periodic operational tasking is an interesting idea, and frankly, it is worth fleshing out. I think the committee would be delighted if we received a paper on it that detailed how it would work. The concept of drawing university students into a program that works, with maybe a short service contract that runs for six years or something, would solve that sort of dilemma. We are very anxious to see ideas like that come forward that will create the popular support that is necessary to sustain the sort of military that we think is appropriate. That leads me to the last issue I wanted to raise with you, and I am really sticking my head in the lion's mouth here. You have talked about the importance of domestic sourcing. I know this is the home of the frigates, or I wish I could say it was the home of all of the frigates, but it is not.
Mr. Milner: Well, it is the home of most of the current Canadian navy, actually.
The Chairman: That is true, but we had a frigate program that ended up being very expensive, again for political reasons. The question that occurs, time and time again, is should the military be used to provide regional subsidies, or should there be other ways? Should we be going for the best price off the shelf whenever we can, and if we need to provide regional subsidies, provide them in a direct, transparent, open way?
Mr. Milner: That is a difficult question. There are some real horror stories about buying locally. I think the CF-5 is probably the standard one among those who teach Canadian military history. You may remember the Northrop Freedom Fighter, the CF-5, the little short-range dart-like aircraft from the 1960s, which was not on the air force's shortlist because you could not do anything with it. However, you could build it in Montreal, so we bought 125 and then warehoused them for about 25 years before we gave them away. That is probably the worst-case scenario. I do not think anyone would argue that what they got when they built the CPF was anything less than a state-of-the-art world- class vessel.
The Chairman: Nobody would, but we could not sell any to anybody else.
Mr. Milner: No.
The Chairman: That was the test; if we could have sold some somewhere else, then we would have an ongoing —
Mr. Milner: Yes, I am not convinced of that. Selling warships, in particular, offshore is an extremely difficult business.
The Chairman: Oh, clearly.
Mr. Milner: Canada tends to build state-of-the-art, all singing, all dancing, very complex large warships. They are more than most navies need; they are too big; the range is perhaps too great; the weapon suite is more sophisticated than what they want. I followed some of the discussion over the attempt to sell the CPF and it was interesting. The Americans will not buy it because they build anti-aircraft destroyers, ASW destroyers and surface-to-surface destroyers. They have different uses for vessels of about the same size, so there are real problems with doing that.
The other problem is that from the navy's perspective, I do not foresee the government buying offshore. As one of my contacts in the navy said, they worked longer and harder to get the government to spend whatever it was, $750 million, on four used submarines than they ever spent trying to get the government to build Canadian patrol frigates, because there is a real national buy-in. Navies have always been that way. Much of what I teach is naval history. You can go right back to the early part of the 1600s, when they started to build standing professional navies in Europe, and there was always a national buy-in. The only people who bought offshore, and actually in another period, were the Dutch, because they had buckets of money so they would buy ships wherever they could find them.
Every major navy has always — if Canada's is a major navy — built domestically, in part because it stimulates the local economy, and because the lead time is so long and the industrial spinoffs for strategic purposes are so important that you want to keep them in house.
I should add, perhaps somewhat impishly, that at some point, I may do a paper on this. The Canadian navy has never had a successful contract for ships that has not been tied to some shipbuilding firm in Quebec. If I were to make a recommendation to the navy today, I would say, ``Find a Quebec builder and that gives you the leverage you need.'' It goes right back to Laurier.
The Chairman: I hear you, and clearly the brass in the navy figured this out a long time ago, but I think it is still challenging. It is almost like saying ``Here is the political component or the political cost if we are intending to move this forward.'' My sense is the taxpayer is not well served in the long run. If we had a program to build ships on an ongoing basis for the Coast Guard and the navy, and that would keep the yard here occupied laying a keel once a year, or once every eight months or whatever, that would make sense. However, it seems to me if you are planning to look at a yard like the Davie yard in Quebec, which employs nobody and has not built anything in years, I think you are playing a trick on the people in the community if you say ``Come back, get trained up again, get geared up, we will give you five years' work, and then you can go back to being a farmer again.'' I think that is a bad stunt for any community.
Mr. Milner: I agree with you. It would be great if we had a national shipbuilding policy that allowed the government to build its fleet on a rotational basis, but we do not plan or operate that way.
The Chairman: The problem is, though, that when you start counting it up what is needed, we do not have enough work for more than one yard, so we do not have competitive contracts. The logic just does not follow through.
It comes back to — and again, it is the theme of all of my points — the question of periodic operational tasking of the militia, jobs for university students, and do you have to source domestically in order to get public support. It seems to me that we are not making a strong enough case, that the taxpayers will get a lot more bang for their buck if we buy off the shelf at the best price.
Mr. Milner: I would agree with you. There was certainly an argument in the 1970s, while the navy was rusting out, that the whole fleet could have been replaced in about 18 months by buying off the shelf in Europe, but the domestic cost of that was enormous. The last shipbuilding program was actually launched during a recession. It is quite unique in Canadian history. Usually, we build in a boom cycle. This one was established in a recession and was used for economic development. It was quite a remarkable development.
The shipbuilding industry, as I understand it, since then has become literally moribund. You are talking about resuscitating an industry that is pretty much off the edge, and at an enormous cost, I agree.
Senator Banks: Professor, I want to get back to your militia idea. You have, in the course of thinking about that and proposing it, considered the lack of a law that requires that a job be held. Talk about that issue. Should we have such a law?
Mr. Milner: I think we should, short and simple. I have been following this, and not simply for this particular project; I have been involved in various committees. I was on the Minister's Advisory Board on Military Colleges for many years, and one thing or another, and people talked about that throughout the time I have been involved in the Canadian Armed Forces. I just think it takes some national leadership. I admit it is not a panacea. There are ways to get around the law. People get laid off. However, it would have to be not simply a law, but part of a culture change.
Senator Banks: What about the argument that if you are a member of the militia you will not get the job in the first place?
Mr. Milner: That may well be. I think a lot depends, obviously, on the employer and the culture of the area. If people think that what you are doing is important and the local militia unit is in good standing, then with luck, people will support you. However, it is a real problem to suggest today that an employer hold a job for someone for three years. I admit that is a serious concern and I do not have a short-term answer for it.
Senator Banks: If you were running a small business, you would understand that concern very well.
Mr. Milner: Yes, you would have to let that person go, no question. It is a serious concern.
Senator Day: Dr. Milner, I wonder if you could just expand a little on the discussion we had earlier. You said it may be the army's time to be at the trough, and we were talking about the role of the air force and the navy. There has been some discussion about maybe going a little further than talking about the different elements of the Armed Forces being at the trough and getting money to buy equipment that they need, and making a fundamental decision that the future Armed Forces will be an army with the air force and the navy servicing that army. Have you some comments on that point?
Mr. Milner: Well, I think it is fundamentally wrong, and that maybe reflects my biases as someone who has spent his life as a naval historian. Navies have a tremendous range of options. You can send a warship to a country in an ambassadorial role. The arrival of a warship is often seen as a demonstration of peace. When you send a warship into someone's port, it is actually an implement of sovereignty.
Senator Day: Diplomacy.
Mr. Milner: Diplomacy, that is right. Generally, you do not deploy a fighter squadron if you want to demonstrate your peaceful intent. You do not deploy an armed infantry battalion as evidence of your peaceful intent. However, you can send a ship dressed overall with its flags and its bunting and the sailors manning the rails, and there may be a latent threat in that, but actually you are displaying part of your sovereignty in a foreign port and saying, ``Here we are.'' It is a piece of Canadian turf.
I do not think the government should or wants to get away from having that capability. I do not think the government should or can retreat from the need to have an air force, particularly in terms of transport and sovereignty patrols, and walk away from that. The idea that this may be the army's turn at the trough is perhaps unfortunate, because I think the navy is probably okay for the short-term, although it needs whatever those new vessels are called.
Senator Day: Supply ships?
Mr. Milner: Yes, the afloat logistics support ships that will presumably help the army out so that they do not end up with most of their modern kit trapped somewhere off Newfoundland in the future. The air force needs some help. The army capital equipment budget contracts tend to be comparatively small compared to those for naval assets and aircraft. The army needs personnel, it needs a break; it needs to integrate the new LAV 3 system because there are real problems. I have seen this at the base, where once you get away from tanks and introduce the new LAV high-speed combat systems, not all of the army can travel as fast as the personnel in the new LAV 3, so there are real problems in organizing the modern battlefield conceptually and practically. However, I think it is an unfortunate choice of words because there are some serious needs, particularly in the air force, at the moment. It really needs to be replaced.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Milner. It is a real pleasure to come to Saint John and we were pleased you were our first witness. We are grateful to you for sharing your views with the committee today. We hope to see you before us again.
Mr. Milner: Good. Thank you very much for taking the opportunity to hear me, and I wish you all the best in your deliberations. This is a tough nut to crack. I have spent my entire professional career thinking about how we can convince Canadians of the requirements for their Armed Forces, and I am anxious to hear your conclusions.
The Chairman: Our next witness is Mr. de Vries. Welcome, Mr. de Vries. You are a retired bandsman who served with the Royal Canadian Regiment Band, and you come before us very highly recommended by the vice-chair of the committee. We understand that you have views that you would like to put before the committee briefly, and we are looking forward to hearing them and then having a short conversation with you.
Chief Warrant Officer Nicolaas de Vries, (Ret.), as an individual: Honourable Senators, ladies and gentlemen, visitors, I have a short introduction. My name is Nicolaas de Vries. I arrived here in 1955 as part of a Dutch contingent of 200 musicians to form up to 16 professional Armed Forces bands. I became part of the Black Watch military band stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We had up to 20 Dutch members. Some of the professional soldiers used to exclaim, ``A Dutchman in a kilt!''
During my tour with our Royal Canadian Artillery Band in Montreal, I obtained my Bachelor of Music Degree at McGill University in 1970. One last point, most of these musicians were always very much part of the local musical scene, whether directing church choirs, playing in local bands, symphonies, educating privately or working in schools or universities. They were all very much tied into the arts and culture scene at the time. They made a conscientious contribution, in other words.
My main topic is how the oldest, the best, the most historic military band, the Royal Canadian Regiment Band, 1908, that used to perform at all schools for the children, the students, at all the important civil and military functions and all the summer and winter festivals in the province, has been taken out of New Brunswick. That is all gone. There is, in fact, no professional musical group or entity such as the military band left in the province.
There is a big void, and the general who did that said that everything could be done with pipes. I suppose that he was under orders too. Now, I ask you, everything with pipes? Well then, we can also do it with recorders, cadet bands, ukuleles and Jew's harps. I am just kidding — well, almost.
People, soldiers in particular, need music. It makes everything better and it can also create world peace. Yes, it can.
My second concern is that for the people of New Brunswick, indeed Canada, musical literacy hardly exists. No one knows what a treble clef means; no one knows how to write Happy Birthday or O Canada in notes. Hardly anyone knows Mr. Beethoven's first name or Dave Brubeck or Stan Kenton, what is swing, jazz, or even blues, et cetera. Everyone knows the BareNaked Ladies, the Grateful Dead, the Crash Test Dummies, Shania Twain and Céline Dion, especially the young and the students, which is fine; or maybe not so fine.
The education system, musically speaking, is often in disarray, pushed away, cancelled, minimized, and yet music is so holy, so great, such a high art form, so beloved, so well used for births, deaths, movies, TV jingles, sports, concerts, dances, singing, weddings, dinners, banquets, shows, and the list goes on.
Plato, Aristotle, long ago said, ``The heavens, the universe, reeks, smells, is overflowing with sounds, harmonies.'' Do we doubt this? Why is it not at the top of the curriculum? Students today, it seems, are getting large doses of hip- hop, rap and world beat. Will they be inspired country and world leaders? Will they create peace? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I firmly believe music, military bands and the education system, including universities, can create world peace. If we had only listened to Mr. Beethoven's 9th symphony, which contains in the middle the greatest peace song ever composed, The Ode to Joy. Anyway, there will always be hope.
Incidentally, universities in the United States have beyond a doubt proven that music students and players of instruments have a 35 per cent overcapacity in brain power, spatial and mathematical ability, memory and creativity.
My greatest concern is the professional soldiers, among the best and finest people of this country at the largest military base in North America, especially in this province of New Brunswick, who no longer have musical services and support for all their formal military functions and parades. Even the officers at their historic mess dinners are today playing tapes and CDs of their regimental marches. I say, ``Shame!''
I have two addenda. Addendum 1 is eliminating bands has caused a lack of pride and esprit de corps. Bands are a recruitment tool and a bridge between community and Armed Forces; for the children, a window onto the Armed Forces that reinforces a pride in the country. The Van Doos kept their band by paying for it with their allotment, I have heard.
A band of 5 to 6, or 9 to 10, or 20 to 25 is sufficient for mess dinners, parades, concerts. Leadership is not tied to rank, but of value. Music is the heart and soul of the Armed Forces. It is conscience. Music feeds the need to help, to make safe, to go to the aid of and save and protect your fellow man. Music feeds courage, feeds pride in work and oneself, feeds harmony, camaraderie, the Canadian Armed Forces family and God and country.
My addendum number 2 is: a) recruitment of local young musicians into the Canadian Armed Forces has been greatly reduced, leaving no further means of developing some of these fine budding musicians; b) the Stadacona Band was supposed to take up the slack in New Brunswick, it is being reported. They were here three, four or five times in eight years. Now that is taking up some slack; c) the cost for the band used to be $1 million per year, now it is $2 million, $2.5 million. The cost, as you all know, for gun control was $1 billion.
Thank you very much. That is the end of my presentation.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. de Vries. It comes as no surprise to the panel that the first questioner is Senator Banks.
Senator Banks: I do not have any questions but I want to agree with the chief. He is right in every respect. I am happy to tell you that the Royal Canadian Artillery Band is alive and well and in Edmonton, which is where I live, chief, and they are doing very well. It is a very good band.
Your points about music in the education system are exactly right, but of course, they have to be addressed to a provincial body and not to us because that, constitutionally, is not in our bailiwick.
I was a master of ceremonies at the final concert of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry Band, because it was one of the excellent bands that were disbanded after 1994. It was a very sad occasion, particularly since when that regiment was founded, the City of Edmonton police band enrolled in the Princess Patricia's and became their first band and went overseas with them.
I share in exactly everything that you have said. I would like you to just expand for the committee's benefit on the way the Americans, to use an odious comparison, use military bands as a recruitment and public relations device, and use if very effectively, and whether you agree with me that the Canadian Forces have never done that to the greatest possible effect. They have failed to see that bands and the things that bands do — not just leading parades, but very much including leading parades — are an enormously effective public relations and recruitment vehicle.
Mr. de Vries: Yes, entirely.
Senator Banks: We could make the horrible, odious comparison that the previous witness talked about, whereby you ask the public, ``Do we need a bigger army or do we need another MRI? Do we need a jet plane or a helicopter or do we need another CAT scan?'' If you had to make a choice about increasing bands at the expense of something else, assuming that the army's and the navy's and the air force's budgets are set, what would you suggest we should do without in order that we can have a band? Would it be one less helicopter, one less artillery battery, one less ship? How would we do it if we had to make the choice? It is a horrible, odious question, and not a true one, but it is a question that is asked.
Mr. de Vries: That is a very good question. I have not even thought about it. However, I suppose I would let go of one soldier, one battle tank and a small ship. At all costs, I would put music first. To me, a regiment of 800 could maybe function with 750 if it came to the choice. However, I would not like to see decreases in anything if we could get a little more money to keep things the same and add music.
Senator Banks: What in your experience is the right size for a military band? You said that you could have nine musicians playing at the mess dinner, but you cannot have nine playing in a parade.
Mr. de Vries: No. We used to have 55-piece bands, and they were very massive, very imposing, and slowly we took away a few musicians and ended up with 29 plus 1. Well, since I have retired, I have done a lot of similar jobs with five people. I have done marches, I have done concerts and I have done mess dinners. We have had lots of applause, because maybe we are very good; I am not so sure. The last officers' mess dinner — of course, they have to pay me a little money to do it — we had applause for every piece of music that we played. I used all the local 20-year-olds who had come out of some of the music systems. I have done these things with a quartet and I have led parades by myself, with my clarinet. People say, ``How can you do that?'' Well, yes, it can be done. One base drum and a clarinet will still lead a parade of sorts, which is quite ridiculous.
Senator Banks: You would not be happy with that, though?
Mr. de Vries: No, of course not. However, a lot of things can be done with five to seven players. You know that better than I do. Big bands can do so much. They can lead parades, they can do big dances, jazz concerts — you name it.
Senator Banks: If you were the boss and you could put a band in New Brunswick, would you put it in Gagetown?
Mr. de Vries: It would be either in Gagetown or somewhere in Fredericton, and I would have the military get first choice sometimes, and sometimes the civilians would get first choice. There is so much work to be done that I think the band would be busy five times per day.
Senator Banks: You talked earlier about the Stadacona Band and you said they came here five or six times in eight years?
Mr. de Vries: They do not come. We were told when the RCR Band was silently and politely kicked out of this province that the Stadacona Band would take up the slack. Now, I am not sure who said it, but I heard it. In eight years, I have seen them three, four or five times, and they were only here because the cadets brought the anchor for the Fredericton. The band was there and I waved at them all, I remember. For the rest of the time, we have never seen them, so ``taking up the slack'' is a white lie and the people here have never had the use of them. Of course, the Stadacona Band is a beautiful band, but they are from Nova Scotia and they do not want to come to us in New Brunswick, so we do not see them.
Senator Banks: When the RCR Band was here, where was it stationed?
Mr. de Vries: We were stationed right at CFB Gagetown. We were stationed in the base theatre. When the base was formed in 1955 — this is a secret tidbit — I was shown the blueprints and there was a band room to be built, but the last $3,000, I think, went to Moose Jaw instead of building a band room, and we never did get it. The bands that were in Gagetown were stationed in the basement and on the top floor of the theatre. That created so many problems that I could sit here a whole hour longer, but I am sure you do not want to listen to that. In the end, in 1985, we finally got an old officers' mess that was made into a proper great band room. However, six to eight years later, they shut it down and built new officers' quarters.
I looked for my band room and I still remember standing there asking, ``What happened?'' and it was gone. They had ploughed it down.
Senator Banks: Thank you, chief.
Senator Meighen: Mr. de Vries, I must say that your reference to Dutchmen and kilts brought back a fond memory of last June 5, the day before the D Day celebrations in France. I came upon a great number of Dutchmen in kilts. They were all playing the pipes. They were all dressed in World War II Canadian regimental uniforms, whether it was the Seaforths or the Black Watch or RCRs. They were parading in World War II vintage vehicles. I can tell you that they made all the difference to the Canadian celebrations in France on June 5 and 6. Of course, their English was so good that for a long time we thought they were all Canadians.
Let me ask you one question, if I may. You talked about, if I heard you correctly, a cost of $2 million to $2.5 million to reinstate the band?
Mr. de Vries: No, that is the cost for the band per year.
Senator Meighen: Per year?
Mr. de Vries: Yes, that is the entire cost.
Senator Meighen: What size band are you talking about?
Mr. de Vries: That would have been a 29-plus-1, 30-piece outfit.
Senator Meighen: Okay. Assuming that, to use Senator Banks' analogy, you were the king and you could cause things to happen, but there was only a certain amount of money, which there always is, what about using the militia units, who already have some sort of musical support, and building them up to provide what we are all in agreement with?
Mr. de Vries: I have thought about that a great deal, and the militia cannot take the place of any professional music unit that is available all day long, all night long, all year long. The militia only come out either when it suits them or in the evening. Again, I am not criticizing the militia. They are fine people, but they cannot take the place of anything during the day for the most part, so the whole day is gone. All these people work and they come out on the weekend. I am not very fond of militia bands for many reasons, and I do not want to get into my reasons. However, they cannot be like the professional band that is on call and can go anywhere at the right time.
Senator Meighen: When you were a musician in the regular forces, were you and other people in your situation required to undertake any duties other than music performances?
Mr. DeVries: Only towards the end of my career, when we had to train with some rifles and gas masks, and we were called the base defence unit. The Russians never did show up when I was there, so I was not called upon. I should retract that, I suppose, about the Russians. That was just a joke.
Senator Meighen: They were obviously scared off.
Mr. de Vries: I will retract that. In the end, the band was used as a defence force when really needed, and I did not have great qualms about that, but we did not like it all that much.
Senator Meighen: Thank you very much, Mr. de Vries.
The Chairman: Mr. de Vries, I want to thank you very much for coming before us. You have brought to our attention something that no other witness has in the three years that we have been serving as a committee. It is an important subject and something that the committee will reflect on. If you had not taken the initiative to come to see us today, I am not sure we would have focused on this. Your trip has been worthwhile from our point of view, and we are grateful to you for appearing before us. Thank you, sir.
Mr. de Vries: Thank you very much.
The committee adjourned.