From major procurement projects to Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) operations and personnel issues, defence policy receives significant media and political attention in Canada. Defence issues are traditionally not the most prominent during election campaigns, but they do regularly emerge as controversial. In 2015, for example, the opposition Liberal Party committed in its platform to cease Canada’s participation in the American-led campaign of air strikes against the Islamic State and to launch a new competition to purchase next-generation fighter aircraft to replace the air force’s ageing CF-18s. Similarly , at the height of the mission in Kandahar in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009, the mission—especially its most controversial aspects, such as the high number of casualties and the issue of detainees—received major media coverage and its future was hotly debated in Parliament.
There are valid reasons for the Department of National Defence (DND) and the CAF to figure so prominently in public and political debates. The CAF play a crucial role in safeguarding Canada’s security and sovereignty, and they represent an essential tool in Canada’s foreign policy toolkit. Together, DND and the CAF employ more than 100,000 civilian and military personnel (including regular and reserve forces), with a budget of slightly more than $20 billion for fiscal year 2018–2019. Indeed, defence expenditures remain the largest source of discretionary spending in the federal budget. While Canada is routinely at the bottom of list of defence spenders in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when expenditures are measured as a portion of gross domestic product, the Canadian military budget ranks about sixth or seventh in the alliance when calculated in real dollars. The amount Canada spends on its military is therefore not insignificant. However, because the defence budget is the largest source of discretionary funds, attempts to reduce federal government spending usually involve cutting funding to the military. Debate about how much Canada should spend on the armed forces, what the military should be equipped to do and at what cost, and how Canadian military expenditures fare when compared with allies remains contested issues and questions.
Yet despite the centrality of defence issues to Canada’s national security and foreign policy and to national debates and discussions on these issues, there has not been a comprehensive book on Canadian defence for more than two decades: the last one, edited by David Dewitt and David Leyton-Brown, was published in 1995. 1 Although the Dewitt and Leyton-Brown volume remains an impressive resource that has stood the test of time, much has changed in Canadian defence since it was released more than twenty years ago. To be sure, much has been published since then on specific aspects of defence, such as military history, 2 North American security, 3 strategic culture, 4 military culture 5 and the consequences of the attacks of 11 September 2001 and of the war in Afghanistan for Canada’s security policies. 6 But a full treatment of recent Canadian defence policy and politics is lacking. This gap is especially striking when compared to the many generalist books on Canadian foreign policy. 7
That is the gap that this book sets out to fill: to provide an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the main issues defining and shaping Canada’s defence policy today and in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The Academia-Policy Gap in Canadian Defence
Bridging the academia-policy gap is the second aim of this book. In selecting topics for the volume and determining how the chapters were to be written, we were determined to make scholarly work on Canadian defence interesting and valuable to decision makers. This involved asking authors to eschew academic jargon and simplify their presentation of theoretical concepts. The authors’ workshop held on December 2017 included practitioners from the DND, and the book includes chapters from serving and retired officers and officials. In so doing, we aimed to continue a long tradition of bringing academics and practitioners together to discuss policy questions and to develop scholarly work that is read by the defence department and Canadian military.
The relationship between academics and defence policy makers has waxed and waned in Canada. From the late 1960s to the mid-2000s, there were strong personal and institutional ties between defence scholars and those working within the defence establishment. A number of examples highlight the connections that existed during this time: academics such as Paul Buteux at the University of Manitoba were closely connected with defence thinkers within government; defence scientists such as R. J. Sutherland published articles in academic journals that continue to be read to this day; Professor Albert Legault from Université Laval served as an advisor in the office of the Minister of National Defence; Joel J. Sokolsky, who would go on to become a professor and later Principal of the Royal Military College of Canada, played an influential part in the debate over Canada’s participation in the Strategic Defence Initiative. Most importantly, however, a series of twelve academic research centres funded by the Department of National Defence’s Security and Defence Forum held a rotating annual conference that brought academic from across the country and representatives from the governments together to discuss the issues of the day. While the exact benefits of these interactions are difficult to quantify, they managed to maintain a bond between the academic and the practitioner world.
The Security and Defence Forum centre funding came to an end in the early 2010s. Policy makers no longer saw the relationship with defence academics as a valuable use of funds in a tight budgetary environment and too many of the centres had drifted well-beyond what could be considered policy-relevant research. A new Defence Engagement Programme was subsequently created to fund individual projects and to create expert briefing series with DND, but regular interactions between academics and practitioners have become rarer. As editors, however, we saw that the Defence Engagement Programme could be used to reverse this trend, however slowly. The authors’ workshop we held to help produce this book partially recreated the meeting of Canadian defence scholars that the SDF once held, but we were also determined to do more than gather as researchers. Our aim was to publish a book that would feature academics, academics who used to be practitioners and practitioners who publish scholarly work. In so doing, our hope was that this volume would not only provide an informed and up-to-date study of Canadian defence affairs, but also encourage a stronger bond between academics and the defence community.
Looking ahead, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about relations between defence scholars and experts and the defence establishment in DND and the CAF. The defence policy published by the Liberal Government in 2017, Strong, Secure, Engaged, committed to increase the DEP’s budget to $4.5 million. As part of this new infusion of funds, the DEP is in the process, as of this writing in early 2019, of launching a new initiative to fund up to nine networks of defence scholars and experts across the country with up to $750,000 for three years each. At the same time, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) has launched its own programme to support connections between the research and defence worlds, the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS). Finally, a Canadian Defence and Security Network centred at Carleton University and led by Professor Steve Saideman was awarded in early 2019 a Partnership Grant worth several million dollars by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Together, this represents an arguably unprecedented amount of new funds in support of research and the development of expertise on security and defence issues in Canada.
At the very least, we hope that this volume will demonstrate that Canadian defence studies remain vibrant and relevant. Our authors include a mix of junior and senior scholars, long-time military observers and academics from other fields who were asked to bring a defence-lens to their work, retired and serving military officers, and former and current defence officials. In so doing, we aimed to highlight the different ways Canadian defence can and should be studied today and the various ways in which policy relevance and academic depth can be combined. We trust that the volume will become a useful resource and reference for students, scholars and practitioners of defence policy in the coming years.
Plan of the Book
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, entitled “The Fundamentals”, opens with an essay by Kim Richard Nossal on Canada’s geostrategic in the international system. The subsequent chapter by Justin Massie and Srdjan Vucetic addresses the issue of Canadian strategic culture and specifically the historical interactions of “imperialism”, “continentalism” and “Atlanticism”. A chapter by Philippe Lagassé looks at how governments are held to account for defence matters, followed by Dave Perry’s chapter on how Ottawa spends on defence today—and with what ramifications for the future. Next, Adam Chapnick and Craig Stone break down the policy process with an eye on the disconnect between defence policy and strategy statements on the one hand and the expected policy outcomes on the other. The final chapter in this part goes to Andrea Charron and Jim Ferguson who critically evaluate competing theories and tropes for thinking about Canada-US defence relations.
Part II brings together various perspectives on the domestic politics of Canadian defence policy. In the opening ...