Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
Earlier this month, the Canadian Government quietly announced its decision to buy 88 F-35A fighters for the Royal Canadian Air Force to replace its fleet of CF-18s, now in service in its fifth decade.
Quietly, because Justin Trudeau had spent much of the previous decade swearing up and down that he would never, under any circumstance, ever buy the F-35.
In fact, he made it one of his major promises in the 2015 election which carried him to office, in spite of the fact Canada had been involved in the F-35’s development since 1997, and indeed the fact that Stephen Harper, his predecessor, had already pledged to buy it.
Under Trudeau, the Government announced an so-called open procurement competition that would consider any fighter aircraft that wasn’t the F-35, which was abandoned once they discovered it would be entirely illegal to do so. To put off decision day, Liberals then bought a lot of rusting F-18s destined for the scrap from Australia, which no one in the military had asked for.
But none of this worked: in the end, with only two remaining aircraft in contention, and one clearly inferior to the other, the writing on the wall.
All it had taken was 13 years, an immense amount of goodwill destroyed from Canada’s industrial partners, and a decade-long delay in their entry into service. And Canada will probably end up paying more than other NATO countries on a per-aircraft basis, too.
But the F-35 debacle is entirely typical of how successive Canadian governments have treated the country’s military. Planes are flown until they fall apart, defence procurement projects are regularly delayed by a decade or more, and home-built naval vessels are often among the most expensive in the world.
Almost seventy percent of defence procurement programs are delayed, even when they involve straightforward off-the-shelf purchases; the recent replacement of World War II-era pistols, for example, took more than a decade.
For years, the Royal Canadian Navy was classified by international observers as being in the same category as that of Bangladesh, after the RCN’s only remaining supply ship (built in 1969 and not replaced despite repeated attempts) caught fire off the coast of Hawaii during NATO exercises, turning the whole fleet into a glorified fisheries patrol.
For good measure, Trudeau then tried to jail the country’s most senior admiral for trying to get a replacement supply ship built on time (a rival shipyard with good connections to the Liberal Party had tried to get the original contract cancelled, which the admiral resisted).
In principle, there should be no reason why Canada has to have such a dysfunctional military. The country has a proud martial history which saw it play an outsized role in both world wars. Canada’s defence spending, although very low either as a share of the GDP or on a per capita basis, is still among the highest in the world in absolute terms, just above that of Israel in dollar terms.
But post-war governments have never been able to decide exactly what the military was for. Geography and history have dictated that, the occasional Fenian raid apart, Canada’s wars have all been essentially wars of choice, engaged out of solidarity with the imperial metropole or to uphold ideas of global order.
This has creating what amounts to a fundamentally unserious strategic culture.
Added to this is the ideological hostility of many Canadian politicians to anything which reeks of war. Trudeau is apt to speak of military matters in puerile terms, such as when he accused Harper of wanting to “whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are” when the Conservatives proposed to provide military assistance against ISIS.
Trudeau’s prime ministerial father was a draft dodger in all but name, and shared the generally dim Québécois view of the military, which he starved of funds (though even under the Trudeau Sr nadir, Canada spent a great proportion of its GDP on the military than it does today).
His own predecessor, Lester B Pearson, tried to make the Canadian Forces a more national institution, as he conceived it, by getting rid of anything which reeked of British tradition (alongside his scrapping of the old Canadian flag and anthem). Admirals were put in green uniforms and whole regiments were disbanded; unsurprisingly, battle-hardened officers left in their thousands.
Pearson’s great achievement on the international stage was to mainstream the idea of peacekeeping, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Peacekeeping fitted itself admirably to a particular type of centre-left Canadian nationalism: self-deprecating yet slightly smug, exuding the sense of superiority that comes with turning guns into peace-making.
But despite peacekeeping’s status as a sort of minor Canadian national symbol, its role in recent missions has been puny. According to the most recent figures, Canada’s contribution to all current UN peacekeeping missions (including police) is a whooping 59 personnel out of 75,000, smaller than the Zimbabwean contingent.
Inevitably, such lack of political direction has impacted Canada’s military capabilities. Recent scandals, notably a string of sexual assault accusations against what seemed like virtually every senior Canadian officer, have done little to boost morale in the ranks. The Chief of the Defence Staff recently ordered a freeze on all non-essential activities to focus on personnel recruitment and retention, so dire are the Canadian Forces’ personnel crisis.
Until Canada’s political class figures out what it wants from its military, the current crisis will continue. But given the current government’s track record on military matters, there is no prospect of this happening any time soon.