Ottawa Citizen - February 12, 2005
Windsor Star - February 21, 2005
By Colin Kenny
A country’s capacity to protect its citizens from natural and man-made threats is so central to the very raison d’être of government that Canadians should be appalled at the government’s performance in recent years.
But the truth is that most Canadians aren’t appalled at all.
There are a couple of good reasons why the federal government has been able to marginalize national security as an issue for the majority of voters. Most Canadians see the country as a peaceful haven in pleasant juxtaposition to the aggressive superpower to the south of us. Plus most Canadians don’t like to think about the potential for horrific events. They don’t come around that often?
But when they do, they’re doozies, aren’t they? And we’re not ready.
More than just about any other developed nation in the world, Canada trusts to luck that things won’t go wrong. Luck, unfortunately, is notoriously untrustworthy, as casino gamblers and VLT players are discovering in greater and greater numbers.
Canadians will find out this month whether the Martin government will continue our decades-old tradition of rolling the dice when it comes to avoiding man-made or natural disasters. We will find out if it will continue to gamble that Canada can retain some measure of political and economic status without financing respectable levels of military and development assistance.
The government is expected to publish its long-awaited international policy paper in February, which will outline, among other things, its plans to reshape Canada’s military and foreign aid infrastructure.
Reshaping is one thing. Rejuvenating is a much bigger thing. Rejuvenating will take more than a new focus, either in the areas of military infrastructure or development assistance. It will take money.
So, while the policy paper will be interesting, the budget to follow will show you whether the government is serious, or spinning a yarn. Two simple questions: (a) How much money will be spent? (b) How quickly? Get very suspicious if cash infusions are spread out over a number of years, especially when they’re back loaded.
Not that throwing money at any problem constitutes a solution to the problem in itself. But nobody should pretend that money isn’t an essential part of the answer, and nobody should try to suggest that focusing more – either on particular international aid recipients or particular military infrastructure – will turn things around. It won’t.
There is bound to be enough reshaping set out in the policy review to create at least the illusion of reform. But the media and the public will have to watch the shells closely – counting the numbers carefully – if they want to know if a healthy pea is really under there somewhere.
Canada’s defence budget as a percentage of GDP has ranked among the lowest in NATO for a long time now. In fact, even fulfilling the two-year-old recommendation of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence that $4 billion be added to the Department of National Defence”s budget (currently $13.3 billion) would leave Canada’s military spending (relative to the size of its economy) far below the NATO median.
Our foreign aid budget is similarly deficient – we’re at .28 per cent of GDP, a little over a third of what the late Lester B. Pearson set out as Canada’s goal, and far behind the most generous European countries. We Canadians feel for the world’s destitute. But we’ve become cheapskates, and as generous as Canadians have been in response to Asia’s tsunami, it’s time to put some credible money into long-term international development.
Too many Canadians avert their eyes, pretending that attributes like a public health care system makes Canada a moral country. But health care is for us. If we’re so moral, what are we offering the rest of the world?
But this is a lot more than a moral issue. Think practically. Canada is a trading nation whose prosperity very much depends on global stability. But we don’t contribute our share to promoting global stability. We cross our fingers and hope all the chaos won’t eventually hit our shores. We will quickly find out what damage means if terrorists find a way of hitting the United States through Canada, and the U.S.-Canadian border gets choked, or closed.
Canadian hawks tend to lament the emaciation of the country’s military capacity. Canadian doves tend to lament the emaciation of Canada’s foreign aid efforts. These two camps should bond.
The doves should recognize that it is too often become impossible for international aid agencies to perform effectively in the field without protection. And the hawks should recognize that, unless intelligent, developed countries make a genuine effort to redress poverty and humiliation in chaotic countries, no amount of force will snuff out the growing hostility toward rich nations.
It is the primary role of any federal government to do everything in its power to secure the physical safety of its citizens. It must also whatever it can to maintain the nation’s capacity to help shape the world’s political and economic future in a way that responds to that nation’s interests.
Canadians have been crawling farther and farther into the shadows for more than a decade. Watch the numbers this month, as closely as you watch the stock market indicators, or your own purse strings. The numbers will tell you if Canada is ready to come out of hiding.
All those words about a new international focus won’t mean a thing if the government doesn’t put its money where its mouth is.
Senator Colin Kenny is chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence he can be reached via email at kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca