The Truth About Canada (36 page)

They quote one former Canadian ambassador as saying that it would take five generations to make a difference in Afghanistan. They cite Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, commander
of Canadian land forces, as saying the Afghan military mission alone would take 20 years.…

In the end, the senators can’t quite bring themselves to accept the inescapable conclusion of their own hard-headed assessment. Everything about their report screams that Canada has no chance of success in Afghanistan. But clearly, the committee is unwilling to take the final step and call for the troops to come home.
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By the summer of 2007, public opinion polls in Canada were showing that an increasing number of Canadians felt we should withdraw our troops from Afghanistan before their mandate ends in February 2009. Many said Canada has had to bear too much of the most dangerous burden of the NATO mission. Many others said that the Harper government had failed to adequately explain the mission to Canadians.
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By July 2007, only 40 percent of Canadians supported our military presence in Afghanistan.
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As the pressure built and opposition in Quebec became overwhelming as troops from that province were scheduled for deployment, Stephen Harper completely reversed his long-established and unequivocal position and announced that Canada’s military mission would end in 2009 unless there was strong support in Parliament. Harper made this promise knowing full well that no such support was possible. Nevertheless, the pro-American “bipartisan” committee Harper appointed, headed by John Manley, will almost certainly have come out in favour of a continuing Canadian presence in Afghanistan. As the
Toronto Star
’s James Travers has written, “It will be a seismic shock if the handpicked panel recommends anything else.”
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Before we go on, we should note that the Harper government has plans to spend an enormous $20.2-billion for planes, helicopters, ships, and trucks for the military.

Very briefly, let’s look at Canada’s role in the arms trade. In contrast to our self-image, Canada is the sixth largest supplier of military goods to the world, the third largest supplier of arms to the United States, behind
only the United Kingdom and Italy, and our military exports have more than tripled during the last seven years.

The UN says the United States supplies the world with 30 percent of conventional arms, but the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says that it’s somewhat higher, and puts Russia in second place at some 30 percent. France is at 9 percent, Germany 6 percent, and the United Kingdom 4 percent. All of the following countries are at approximately 2 percent each: Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, India, Japan, and Israel.
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One of the strongest and most effective lobbies in Canada is the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries. Some of the companies involved in the lobby group include SNC Technologies, which sells large quantities of ammunition to the U.S. military, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Aircraft. The Canadian industry’s sales are about $7.5-billion a year. According to
Maclean’s
, “In recent years Canadian military products have gone to over 70 countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and Venezuela.”
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As B.C. journalist Stephen Hume has pointed out,

By some estimates, the world spends more on weapons annually than the total yearly income for near half the world’s population.

Never in human history has the world been a more dangerous place for individuals — particularly for women and children — and the younger the children, the greater the risk.
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Now to peacekeeping. Over 50 years ago, a Canadian idea led to the founding of the first United Nations peacekeeping force to deal with the Suez crisis. Generations of Canadians know of, respect, and are proud of our role as peacekeepers. But without most Canadians being aware, all this has changed.

In 1991, Canada had almost 1,150 soldiers directly involved in UN peacekeeping operations. By the fall of 2008, we were down to only 57 out of a total of over 73,000 UN peacekeepers. Compared to the total
number of military personnel other countries contribute to UN peacekeeping, we’re now 36th in the world. Thirty-sixth! Where once we had one of the best and most admired peacekeeping forces in the world, today our military has been transformed and our reputation sadly diminished at a time when the UN needs our peacekeeping support more than ever before. In the words of well-known Canadian Major-General (ret’d) Lewis MacKenzie, “Somebody put a marker up and said, ‘Rest in peace, peacekeeping,’ because it is no more.”
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The Economist
says the notion that Canadians do peacekeeping has become largely a myth.
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In 2006, there was a record high number of soldiers and police in UN peacekeeping operations. Where traditionally Canada’s contribution was around 10 percent of UN forces, we’re now down to only about one-10th of 1 percent of all those in the 16 UN missions (2006). Yet an October 2005 poll showed that 69 percent of Canadians still considered peacekeeping a defining characteristic of Canada.
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Unfortunately, it is indeed, but not exactly the compliment Canadians thought they were expressing.

More and more Canadians (witness the trend in the public opinion polls) have realized that what we’ve been doing in Afghanistan (in a NATO, not a UN, operation) has much more to do with offensive military operations than with peacekeeping.

The UN’s 2005 decision that the “responsibility to protect” should be a principle for future operations was strongly promoted by Canada as a basis for the protection of civilians. As Lloyd Axworthy and many others have argued for two years, Canada should be “relocating resources now dedicated to war-fighting in Afghanistan to peace-building initiatives that cry out for attention and leadership. Darfur leads the list.”

In a 2007 public opinion poll, two-thirds of Canadians mistakenly agreed that “Canada is an essential contributor to peacekeeping,”
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and three out of five said Canadians “are dying in Afghanistan for a cause we cannot win.”
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James Travers writes of the persistent doubts about what could be reasonably achieved in Afghanistan and “the notable absence of political candour” from both the Conservatives and the Liberals. Travers says, “The military, along with the arms lobby, will howl, but one alternative is
peacekeeping, and there’s lots of it to be done. It’s also true peacekeeping is not what the military wants to do.”
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As Michael Valpy has written,

Canada has turned down so many United Nations’ requests to join peacekeeping missions during the past decade that the UN has stopped asking.

Today, there is, in fact, not a single Canadian officer in the UN’s peacekeeping headquarters.
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By 2007, over 200,000 men, women, and children had been killed in the Darfur area of Sudan, and some 2.5 million had been made homeless by the conflict there. In August 2007, the United Nations finally decided to send a force of 26,000 military and police peacekeepers into Darfur. At this writing, there was no sign that there would be any Canadians among them.

Before we go on, a few words about U.S. military spending, which accounts for almost half the entire world’s trillion-dollar-plus military expenditures. Depending on whom you choose to believe, U.S. “defence” spending is between six and 15 times Russia’s, and between six and 10 times China’s.

By early 2007, China had become the world’s second biggest military spender, reportedly spending $49.5-billion annually, ahead of the United Kingdom, Japan, and Russia, and its spending was scheduled to increase by 18 percent during the year. As Douglas Roche, Canada’s former ambassador for disarmament, has pointed out, all potential U.S. enemies put together spend only about 25 percent as much on their military spending as the United States, and U.S. spending is about 26 times the combined total of seven “rogue states.”

By 2006, U.S. military spending was greater than all U.S. medicare and social security spending combined, coming in at some $529-billion (U.S.), a figure which included the costs in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It also includes about $73-billion for R&D for developing a whole new generation of deadly weapons.

In February 2007, President George W. Bush proposed a new military
budget that would bring the total to $622-billion. And in August, the United States announced a staggering increase in the supply of American arms to the Middle East totalling $63-billion over a decade, including $20-billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, which from 1990 to 2000 bought $40-billion worth of military equipment from the United States.

So much for the needs of poor Palestinians.

A few words about the Arctic. Who owns and controls Canada’s Arctic waters? Canadians do, of course! Not so, say the Americans.

The United States has never recognized Canada’s claim to sovereignty in the Arctic, regardless of what your maps show. And with global warming and the inevitable opening of the Northwest Passage to shipping, the Americans contend they don’t need Canadian permission to sail through the Arctic islands, and that means no one needs permission, not Koreans, not Iranians, not terrorists, not anyone. The Americans say the Northwest Passage is “an international channel for passage” and they plan to expand the presence of the U.S. Navy in the region. The U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, says, “the Northwest Passage is a strait to be [open] for international navigation. It’s not a Canada-U.S. issue, it’s a Canada-versus-the-rest-of-the-world issue.”
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As well, the European Union considers the passage “neutral territory,” while in 2007 Russia announced plans to vastly expand its territorial claims in the Arctic, well into Northern Canada and areas long thought to be rich in minerals, oil, and natural gas. Some estimates suggest that as much as 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbons are in the Arctic.
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What has been the Harper government’s response? They have cancelled their election-promised plans to build three armed military icebreakers and put in place strings of underwater sensors. Instead, they plan six to eight smaller patrol ships, while both Russia and the United States operate heavy icebreakers capable of sailing in the Arctic ice in any month. To the Conservatives’ credit, in August 2007 the Harper government also announced plans to build two new military bases in the Arctic, a training centre and a deepwater port at the northern end of Baffin Island, a strategic spot near the eastern mouth of the Northwest Passage.

Peter Wilson of the Nunavut Planning Commission comments that Harper’s

“slushbreakers” won’t actually be capable of operating in the Arctic year-round. They’ll have to retreat south when it gets too cold for them up North [while] the U.S. and Russia have the capability to cruise through or under Canadian Arctic waters in any season.

This is an embarrassment. There are many important things that Canada can do in its Arctic — all of them assert sovereignty.
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For President George W. Bush, “the North Pole is our backyard. The U.S. has huge geopolitical interests in the Arctic.”
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Not to mention the interests of the huge American oil companies.

For the Pentagon, Canadian claims of Arctic sovereignty are “excessive” and “tenuous.” For the current U.S. ambassador to Canada, his country has long been clear on the matter: the Northwest Passage is an international strait and American ships do not need Canada’s permission to pass through it. Many major maritime nations agree. For them, the passage represents a 7,000 to 8,000 kilometre shortening of the key trade route between Europe and the Pacific Ocean. For the United States, aside from strategic military concerns, the passage will shorten the sailing distance between Tokyo and New York by 7,000 kilometres.

The most recent estimates suggest that almost all of the summer sea ice will be gone no later than 2040, but massive melting will continue to take place much earlier. One study says that an area of summer ice the size of Alaska has melted over the past 28 years.
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As University of British Columbia international law expert Michael Byers has pointed out,

The briefing book given to Gordon O’Connor when he became defence minister states “If the current rate of ice thinning continues, the Northwest Passage could be open to more regular navigation by 2015.”

International shipping in the Arctic entails serious environmental risks. An oil spill would cause catastrophic damage.

Then there are the security concerns. Ships carrying illicit cargoes could be attracted by the relative absence of a police or military presence. Smugglers, illegal migrants, even terrorist groups could regard an ice-free Arctic as an open backdoor to Canada and the U.S.
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Meanwhile, a new U.S. Navy estimate suggests that the Northwest Passage will be open to shipping for a minimum of one month every summer by as early as 2011, and a May 2007 report said that the Arctic ice has been melting 30 years faster than previously forecast. In September 2007, experts said that they were “stunned” by the rapid loss of ice and the accelerated loss every year since 2002. Since September 2005, the extent of Arctic sea ice has fallen by an enormous 600,000 square kilometres.