Canada can’t risk rearming at a peacetime pace
The defence plan is good. It just needs to happen much, much faster
Is Canada finally beginning to arm itself against the new era of geopolitical disorder? The dollar figures in the federal government’s new defence policy, reprised in Tuesday’s budget, suggest so. But a closer look indicates otherwise. Greater urgency and speed are needed.
Consider, first, the tenor of the Defence department’s updated policy, end titled Our North, Strong and Free: A Renewed Vision for Canada’s Defence, which updates 2017’s Strong, Secure & Engaged (in which, full disclosure, I had a small hand while working in the Prime Minister’s Office). As far as that goes, this update gets full marks.
In stark terms, the paper outlines the dizzying scope of new threats, whether in the cyber domain, in space, from AI, from hypersonic missiles, and from drones. Meanwhile Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are moving and acting together, as an authoritarian bloc.
These four are not quite presented as the new Axis versus the Allied powers, but there’s more than a whiff of that. Whether in the cyber domain, in Ukraine, in the Pacific or the Middle East, those authoritarian powers have been the democratic West’s principal strategic adversaries for years. It’s high time this was made explicit.
“Through their actions,” the policy states, “they normalize the use of violence, coercion and intimidation to achieve their political ambitions. These efforts and the increasing cooperation among them allow them to share military technologies and resources and direct them at democratic states.”
