Updating Defence Policy

Head Table Guests

Bergin Kulenovic, grade 13 student, Jarvis Collegiate Institute; Been. Garry S. Thomson, Deputy Commander, Land Force, Central Area Headquarters; Harold Perry, President, Mandrake Management Consultants; The Rev. Canon Harold F. Roberts, Rector, St. Timothy's Church Agincourt and a Past President, The Empire Club of Canada; Edward Crawford, Chairman, Atlantic Council of Canada and Chairman, Canada Life Assurance Company; MGen. Bruce J. Legge, Q.C., Partner, Legge & Legge, a Past President, The Empire Club of Canada and Chairman, Honorary Colonels of Canada; Dr. Lorna Marsden, President, Wilfrid Laurier University; The Hon. Barnett Danson, P.C., Former Minister of Defence and Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Father Briant Cullinane, Chancellor in Temperal Affairs, Archdiocese of Toronto; Col. John Marteinson, Senior Vice-President, Atlantic Council of Canada; MGen. Reginald W. Lewis, Past President, The Empire Club of Canada, Chairman, The Empire Club Foundation and Chairman, Toronto Economic Development Corporation; Robert D. Weese, Vice-President, Government and External Relations, GE Canada; and Herbert Phillips Jr., President, The Canadian Club of Toronto.

Introduction by John Campion

Arthur Wellesley's Breeches and Hose

On February 3, 1815, Arthur Wellesley, the son of an impoverished but noble Anglo-Irish family reached Vienna. He made an immediate and grand entrance to the Congress which had been in session since September, 1814.

The purpose of the Congress was to define the world after what was thought to be the end of the Napoleonic wars. Wellesley wore a scarlet field marshall's uniform, a solitary peninsula medal and white breeches and hose.

His entry caused a sensation--he was the only professional general among sovereigns and chancellors. He had not yet met Napoleon Bonaparte in battle but at 45 years old, had beaten all of Napoleon's best marshalls and troops in Spain.

Unknown to him, the Duke of Wellington was on the eve of the battle that together with the peace conference that followed, was to create an international order that lasted for 100 years.

Twenty-five days later, on March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from the Island of Elba. He went straight to Paris. He arrived without an army, but soon got one.

As history will tell, on June 18, 1815, at 11:25 a.m., two of the greatest generals of all time met at Waterloo. The battle lasted until midnight. Bonaparte fought his last campaign and Europe was finally at peace.

The peace and the international order that followed, created the longest period without war that Europe ever experienced. The single most important diplomatic principle upon which that peace was created and continued was the balance of power.

Henry Kissinger has described this balance of power as only a physical and moral equilibrium among states that could be overthrown by an effort of magnitude too difficult to mount.

By 1818, France was admitted to the Congress system of equilibrium called the Concert of Europe. Except for a few shortlived events, the Revolution of 1848, the Crimean War in 1854 and the Prussian invasion of France in 1871, the Concert of Europe maintained peace for a century.

But by the end of the first decade of this century, the Concert of Europe had petrified into a bi-polar struggle of two main power groupings. While the players in those power blocks changed, this bipolar system of competition and aggression was to last until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991.

Pascal put the result of bi-polar madness painfully:

"We run heedlessly into the abyss, after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it."

And so, 80 years ago this year, the war that was to bring Canada of age, and to final independence, was commenced. That war was to be followed by a second, engulfing the world in a mighty clash covering the globe.

Fifty years ago today, the end of World War II was all but secured. Canadians stood in France, Belgium, Italy and Germany. The struggles after that war ended in 1945 continued between two armed empires, that of the United States of America and that of the Soviet Union.

That bi-polar state of danger maintained its deathly grip on the world until the last bricks of the Berlin Wall were removed. Canadian men and women, with courage and self-sacrifice, helped to secure the world that we now inherit. Most of us born after 1945 have known no battles and are heirs to a world that promises peace, but which has thrust upon us new responsibilities for maintaining it. We remember those courageous, self-sacrificing men and women.

It is important to note that at the dawn of this new age, just when the world seems free of the bi-polar danger that made this century the most violent in history, the world has evolved into a complex and militarily dangerous place.

Overpopulation, rapid Third World development, First World economic dominance, ethnic and religious strife, starvation, arms and nuclear proliferation and many other powerful forces leave Canadians in need of a modern but rational defence policy.

The Minister of Defence has the responsibility to find structures to preserve the safety and order of Canada that so many men and women served and died to create.

David Collenette was a Member of Parliament from 1974 to 1984. He was re-elected in 1993. He has been Minister of State for Multiculturalism, President of the Privy Council and a member of numerous important parliamentary committees.

In the 1980s, Mr. Collenette was assigned by Prime Minister Trudeau to Westminster to explain the Canadian position on the Constitution. He is now the Minister of National Defence and Veteran Affairs. In the private sector, Mr. Collenette has worked in a number of business areas. He is married to Penny and has one son, Christopher. Please welcome The Honourable David Collenette.

David Collenette

Mr. President, John Campion of The Empire Club, the President, Herb Phillips of the Canadian Club, my former parliamentary colleagues, Senator Lorna Marsden and

The Honorable Barney Danson, head table guests, including many from the military, both past and present, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour for me to be here today to thank John Campion for his great speech. I think John has shown a remarkable grasp on historical and military matters. In fact, while listening to him, I wondered why you wanted to hear from me at all. I'm probably not the first speaker to have used that particular approach.

This is a month of remembrance in a year of anniversaries. In June we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and I was very honoured to be present with the Prime Minister for those ceremonies both in Britain and in France. In fact, it was particularly touching for me, having been born in London just after the war, to be with the Prime Minister. Her Majesty the Queen and the Prime Minister officiated at the Canadian memorial ceremonies at Canada Gate, just across from Buckingham Palace. For those of you who will visit London, I think that you should do well to see this memorial to the 100,000 Canadians who died in both wars on European soil. And of course we have just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Schelde, a major Canadian victory and a turning point in the liberation of Belgium. As John pointed out, this is the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, and we are one week away from November 11, the date that is set aside to remember what we owe to those who sacrificed so much for peace and freedom and enabled us to enjoy such a rich, peaceful existence.

Like most Canadians of my generation, I have been fortunate enough to have lived my life in peace, although, by virtue of my early years in London, I was touched by the war by growing up in its aftermath. (I will talk a little about that later.) In terms of my family's participation in matters military and in the quest for peace, my father served in the Second World War, as did my two grandfathers, and most of my great-uncles served in the First World War.

And so the remembrance that we are celebrating today in this week before November 11 is a portion of the debt we owe to the past. But it is only a portion. Because we also owe it to those who served and sacrificed to respect a hard-won legacy of peace, and to be vigilant about preserving it. These matters have been much on my mind in the year that I have been Minister of National Defence and Minister of Veteran Affairs.

When we won the election last year, I hoped the Prime Minister would ask me to help him form a government and be a member of the government. He called me the night after the election and said, "Look, I am not promising anything, but if I want you to go in the cabinet, what would you like to do?" Of course, having never thought about it before, I said, "Well I would like..." and I mentioned a couple of posts. Defence was not one of them. He said, "Okay, we'll talk in a few days." Then his office called and said, "The Prime Minister wants to see you on Saturday morning." So I went into the Leader of the Opposition's office in Ottawa where he was and we had a good chat for about half an hour or so about what lay ahead. He said, "Look, I want you to be Minister of Defence." I thought about it and I said, "What about the other two options we discussed?" He said, "You don't want to be Minister of Defence because that is a mine field." I said, "Mr. Prime Minister, have you read the Red Book? Defence is not going to be easy." "Well," he said, "you don't seem to be too pleased." I said, "I am honoured, but Defence?" He said, "Well, make up your mind. You don't have any choice." I learned then that power had transformed our Prime Minister into the Prime Minister that we see today: a man who knows his responsibilities, a man who is very dedicated to his duties, but someone who is extremely decisive.

I want to talk seriously about the period that we are living through. The Canadian Forces are being challenged in a way in which they have never been challenged before. To justify how the Armed Forces serves the national interest and how our defence policy must be updated to the new realities of the post-Cold War era, I would first like to look at the three roles of defence policy as concentric circles, because I think it's only by understanding the interlocking of the responsibilities of the military that one understands the full ambit of policy.

First of all, let's look at the domestic role. Within the Forces, the central role has always been to protect Canada in partnership with our allies and in preservation of our sovereignty. It is a huge responsibility. We're custodians to the second largest land mass in the world. We have the longest navigable coastline. We have vast seas beyond our shores over which to watch. We have 71,000 people, men and women, who serve with distinction in the sea, land and air forces. And this is the duty that comes to most people's minds when they think of national defence-serving the national interest. But the Canadian Forces often support other national interests, directly related to our sovereignty. For example, in the past year I have come to appreciate very much the role that the National Defence Department has in helping the Department of Fisheries in fisheries protection. Since 1977, Canada has had jurisdiction over an area extending 200 nautical miles from shore and, more recently, we felt obliged to extend that jurisdiction beyond the 200-mile limit in some limited circumstances. And without enforcement that jurisdiction would be theoretical, would be control on paper only. So the Canadian Forces, working under the lead of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, have real control. In this role, our armed forces personnel actually become and are designated as fisheries officers. Naval vessels and maritime control aircraft routinely conduct fisheries patrols up our coast and they regularly assist in boardings and inspections of Canadian and foreign fishing vessels.

The Forces are frequently called upon to help counter illegal activities that challenge our sovereignty. By far the most significant is the trafficking in illegal drugs. The release of pollutants either accidental or deliberate in our waters and attempts to circumvent our immigration laws are also other challenges that the modern military has to meet by assisting other agencies of government. Drug smuggling, for example, has come a long way from those years where you had a single boat with an outboard motor and a single-engine Cessna. Today it's characteristically a well-bankrolled highly sophisticated operation, sometimes involving large vessels, multi-engine aircraft and quasi-military tactics. In such cases, military capability is crucial in dealing with the problem. For example, i this January, the Canadian Armed Forces assisted in dealing with what has turned out to be the largest cocaine' smuggling operation that Canada has ever seen. The', smugglers' equipment included a mother ship cruising at', about 50 kilometres off shore, an off-load vessel at a Nova Scotia port ready to sail out and transfer one cargo. We had the two ships tracked by Canadian radar in Aurora patrol aircraft and once the transfer had been made, the RCMP boarded the off-load vessel and seized a very large shipment of cocaine. And at another appropriate moment, the RCMP officers boarded a Canadian warship and then went to the mother ship and escorted it back into Halifax. As I said, this turned into the largest cocaine seizure in Canadian history.

Another domestic area that we have to be concerned with in defence is search and rescue. You have heard a lot about it in recent years because of the helicopter controversy (we can talk a little bit about that later). But search and rescue in a country as expansive as Canada is an essential role and defence is the lead government department in that area. But it also works with the provinces and with volunteer agencies from coast to coast. We largely supply the airlift capacity through our helicopters, Auroras, patrol planes, the Buffalo and Hercules aircraft. We see that not a week goes by without some alarm, whether it is in mountains of Alberta and British Columbia or whether it is off our west and east coats. Indeed, this very week you saw that very dramatic rescue in the high Arctic. National Defence was part of that operation.

National Defence and the Canadian military also have a role domestically in giving aid to the civil power. It is something we have to be prepared for, although it is something we don't want to do very often. Twice in the last 20 years, both at Oka and in the aftermath of the War Measures Act, we had to use that power to assist civil authorities.

The second circle of responsibility is continental. Since 1940, when Prime Minister Mackenzie King and President Roosevelt met at Ogdensberg and signed the Ogdensberg Agreement, Canada and the U.S. have had very deep cooperation on defence matters relating to North America. That relationship, of course, expanded throughout the Second World War and during the Cold War. It remains today because the security of our continent continues to be crucial. It continues to be vital to our national interest, notwithstanding the fact that the threats of the last 40 years have diminished. The Soviet Empire may have crumbled, and the immediate threat may be gone, but one can never be sure where a threat to our integrity may arise. So the nature of the requirement to defend North America may have changed, but the rationale for co-operation hasn't. Our sovereign and national security still demand that we monitor and control our continental approaches. And we do co-operate. We won't go into great details, but we have squadrons of F-18s, we've got destroyers, we've got two brigade groups ready, we've got the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and we've got

Canadian personnel involved with the U.S. Airforce on the AWACS plane controlling our continental approaches. So we are very much part of that continental defence.

The third responsibility, the third circle that I mentioned, is our global responsibility. It's the largest circle of responsibility because it encompasses an area where our values, our interests and our international commitments coincide. Canadians were pioneers in peace-keeping. In supervising the elections in 1947 in Korea, we first took part in the UN's peace-keeping missions. We also were part of the monitoring of the cease-fire in India and Pakistan in 1949. And, of course, everyone knows that we gained particular recognition by Lester Pearson's creation of peace-keeping forces that dealt with the Suez crisis in 1956 and 1957. Once this particular force was created, it established a new benchmark for peace-keeping missions, because it maintained peace in the region where conflict had the potential to evolve into a major war.

Increasingly we have been called upon by the UN to increase our participation. They want Canadians because we're good. We've got the training, we've got the equipment, and we've got the track record. When I was in Bosnia about a year ago, in fact I think it was almost a year to the day, or just close to it, I was struck by the remarks of commanders of other UN countries' forces: that Canadians were the best performers in that very difficult theatre. It's because Canada enjoys the trust and confidence of these nations that our missions are often a key to conflict resolution.

The scale of the complexity of the demands on our services haven't changed much since the end of the Cold War. Today we have over 3,000 Canadians serving around the world, from Bosnia and Crotia to mine clearance in Cambodia, and humanitarian assistance in Rwanda. We have about 600 people ready to go in Haiti, and we are in the Golan Heights and a number of other theatres of conflict--performing vital missions.

In fact, peace-keeping isn't just about land forces. Peace-keeping today has also evolved to include air and sea. In terms of the problems in the former republics of Yugoslavia, we have not only the 2,000 ground forces, but we are involved in making Hercules flights from Italy into Sarajevo for the airlift. We have been the mainstay of that operation. We have been, as I said, involved with the AWACs in monitoring the airspace in the no-fly zone over Bosnia. And of course we've had our frigates and our destroyers in the blockade of the Montenegro Coast. I think we still have HMCS Toronto in that theatre, with close to 300 personnel aboard.

So peace-keeping isn't just a policing effort. It's multifaceted, multi-dimensional. Of course, today we are faced with a different kind of world. Our international relationships are changing. One of the things that we have to decide in the defence review is our commitment to the UN, NORAD, and of course NATO.

NATO itself is changing. When I was there last December for the first meeting, we discussed for the first time the concept of partnership for peace, an idea that came from the U.S. They're to be congratulated for it. It suggests a way to try to accommodate the newly emerging nations of Eastern and Central Europe without upsetting that delicate balance that always has to be present and without upsetting the innate forces of conflict in the region. And so when I went in May to a NATO meeting, we had our regular defence planning meetings, but then we had another session and the Russian Defence Minister spoke to us for 45 minutes without notes and gave a fascinating counter-point to the views that we share. Think of that. Five years ago the Russian Defence Minister would not have been there at NATO with all the NATO ministers talking about security for the region. But that's what is happening today. And that probably demonstrates why NATO still has its value, albeit in a reshaped form. Canada fully supports the PNP exercise. Just this past week our Chief of Defence Staff John de Chastelain and my parliamentary secretary went to witness a military exercise of NATO that used many troops from the former eastern countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and others. You would never have thought that would be possible five years ago. And we have developed and will use memorandums of understanding on military matters with some of these countries. People from Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are coming to Canada to be taught English or French to learn training methods. Some of them will be coming to our new peace-keeping training centre that we have established in Cornwallis in Nova Scotia.

But the changing world of security problems and the way we shape our military posture to respond to those problems have to be put in the context of the fiscal realities of today. Last week my colleague Paul Martin was here. He is doing an outstanding job in a very difficult post at a very difficult time. And you should know that every member of our government and our caucus is behind Mr. Martin and his attempt to deal with the financial problems facing this country. As the minister with the largest operating budget within the government, I have to be sensitive to fiscal realities.

In fact there are two views of public finances. A late Senator from the United States once said, "It's a billion here, it's a billion there, the first thing you know it adds up to real money." Perhaps he had a bit of foresight as to where public finances were going in the United States and, of course, by extension in Canada. But one of our excellent Canadian writers has a contrary view of the debt and the deficit. He recently stated: "There's no exam, ple of a nation becoming rich by paying its debt."

Well, I don't know if Mr. Desaul is here today, but I can tell you that the Jean Chretien Liberal government is going to do its best to prove him wrong. Defence spending has been coming down. We've chopped $21 billion off planned defence expenditures between 1989 and now. That includes cuts by those other guys that were there before. They put in place measures to take $14 billion out and some of those measures are still clicking in. At the same time, our Red Book said that we had to reduce defence spending and cancel the H-101 as well as about $3 billion of other spending in the department. I announced those cuts in February of this year. The cuts included about 30 base closings and installation closings across the country. We are in the process of downsizing our total force by about 8,100 military and 8,400 civilian personnel, so we're coming down to a steady state (we hope) of 66,700. The number of civilians should be down from about 35,000 to 25,000 or 27,000 people.

So we are cost cutting, we are trying to live within our means and we're trying to introduce new ways in the management of defence to tackle some old problems. We're trying to introduce innovative management practices that many of you who are in business have had to use in the recession: the use of private sector alternatives, whether it be in food service, search and rescue, aircraft maintenance or anywhere else. We are looking to develop partnership with business to bring our costs down.

To sum up, everything I've seen over the past 12 months, both here and abroad, has convinced me of the continuing relevance of the Canadian Forces. The question, of course, is how we are to shape our policy to meet a very relevant mission. I don't think anyone in this room would disagree with the relevance of the mission of the Canadian Armed Forces.

So we have a process in play to come to a new defence policy and I hope that that will culminate in the white paper being issued sometime before Christmas. If it comes out a little later, a few weeks later, please don't hold me to it, but the Prime Minister was very firm. When he announced the cancellation of the H-101 helicopter as the first act of his government he said, "There will be a new defence policy in place within a year." So within a year, give or take (in this case give a few weeks) we will have that. We are on target. For the first time we have involved Canadians in the making of defence policy. No other government has had a parliamentary committee travel across the country, and around the world to hear views of our allies, see conflicts in Bosnia, see operations in the U.S. and other allied settings and have so many public deliberations, as the Special Joint Committee on Defence that gave its report to the House of Commons and Senate this past Monday. So it is the first time Canadians have had their say in the new defence policy. I've just read it and I can tell you that we certainly will take the findings of that report into serious consideration in the development of our new policy.

There are two other components to the review process. One is what is going on constantly at the Department. There are always forward planning cycles and activities at Defence. Many in the military, civilians as well as uniformed people, have their own ideas of where we should be going. I was interested to read that Richard Gywn said, "The most important person we have to hear from is Collenette because he is the Defence Minister," and that Gwyn has heard the defence policy's all written. It is interesting he would write that and not call me up. I know Richard, he's a good guy. So we called him up before the meeting and said, "I think you should hear from Collenette before you make statements like that, because the defence paper, the white paper, is not written." It's not going to be written by the Department. It's going to be written by the government. I have been holding my own consultations. There are a few people here today that I've met with privately--experts, people interested in defence and foreign policy matters--so I have my own advice. I want to see what my officials recommend and what the Canadian Armed Forces recommend. I've read the report from Canada 21, the Atlantic Council put out a good report, the Defence Committee has reported, but in the final analysis I'm going to have to decide what I think my colleagues will accept. It's a pretty tall order. I can tell you we planted X, to use a military expression. Next week Parliament may be on holiday, but I am going to be working around the clock, because we do have a bit of a deadline in trying to meet the need to have the defence policy stated very very quickly. So it hasn't been decided, but it will be decided pretty soon.

And in that process, we'll have to decide what kind of equipment we are going to need. There are a myriad of views. Some people actually think that you can send soldiers into battle without the right equipment. On the other hand, some will say, "Well, how in God's name can we afford to cut government expenditure everywhere and then go out and buy armed personnel carriers or helicopters? What will the public think?" We have to wrestle with these particular questions, because, as the old expression said: "You have to give people the tools so they can do the job." In preparing for this speech, I went back to one of my favourite authors and politicians of the past, Winston Churchill, and to a little book on his wit. After he had delivered the famous speech that said, "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, in the streets and we shall fight forever and we shall never surrender," he covered up the microphone and he said, "and if we can't do that, we will hit them over the head with bottles." Now I don't want that to happen to the Canadian Armed Forces. On the other hand, I have to be very much aware of what Paul Martin said to you last week about the necessity of living within our means and making sure that we do not lose sight of the financial challenge that we have to meet as Canadians. So we have got to get it right and I hope to get it right in the next few weeks.

We can't predict when peace may be threatened or on what scale or how Canadian interest may be affected. Canada needs a defence policy that is affordable, realistic, and effective. And we need a defence policy that will allow us to manoeuvre with flexibility and responsiveness to change.

Someone once said, "Any fool can make a war and that's the reason good men have to arm themselves." But the poet Homer said, "Men grow tired of sleep, love and singing and dancing sooner than they do of war." Is man by nature war-like? I don't know. I'll leave that up to the philosophers. The fact is that these two contradictory quotes are things that we have to grapple with in the formulation of defence policy.

I'm not a militarist; I'm not a passivist; but I'm a realist and I'm an idealist. But what is an idealist? "Idealism," I said one writer "increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem." But I've seen the results of war. I'm reasonably young, despite the fact that I don't have much hair. I was born in London in 1946 in the West End an area that was badly bombed. I mentioned that my family served in the war. Eight of our family were killed in an air raid. I went to school with kids who had no fathers because their fathers were killed. I suppose that that has brushed me with a bit of realism.

But I came to Canada, a country with great promise, a country that certainly has been wonderful to the Collenette family and wonderful to me in particular. I could never imagine myself as a member of John Major's Cabinet. Certainly, given the kind of system that exists in Britain, and the type of background I came from, I don't think that would be possible. Some would argue that you would not want to be a member of John Major's Cabinet. Politics is tough. We had some tough years in the Trudeau years. Politics has its ups and downs. Right now we're enjoying unprecedented support, but we have some tough decisions to make. I have seen the results of war and I suppose that that has conditioned me a little bit. But Canada has given me a sense of idealism. I appreciate the ethos of Canadians who want to be peace-makers, who want to resolve conflicts. We are not inherently a war-like people.

But the problem that I keep facing is that there are lots of fools around. I only take the goods to the station. As the government gets on the train, it is up to the Prime Minister and the rest of my colleagues. But the question we're going to have to decide is: If there are always fools around, how are we going to deal with those fools in the years ahead?

Ladies and gentlemen, governing is not easy. Living is not easy, but if you're open and honest with people and if you approach your problems forthrightly, I think even those that may disagree with you will accept they have had a fair hearing. In the debate that we have had in the last six to seven months, no matter what side one is on with respect to foreign policy and defence policy for the twenty-first century, no one can say that they haven't had the opportunity to be heard. And that I believe speaks volumes about the kind of leadership our Prime Minister has had instilled in Ottawa. I think he is respected for that across the country. So in the weeks ahead, keep your TV sets and your radio sets on and read the papers because the debate will heat up. But it's a debate that has involved and will continue to involve all Canadians.

John, thank you once again for this great opportunity to speak to my fellow citizens of Toronto.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Herbert Phillipps Jr., President, The Canadian Club of Toronto.