Poland invoked NATO Article 4 last week after Russian drones entered Polish airspace forcing a defensive military response. On the weekend, Romania reported a Russian drone violating their airspace, as well. As a member of NATO, Canada enjoys joint protection, but also shares in joint responsibility.
When the world looks at Canada, our military is not the first thing that comes to mind. As someone who leans left, wanting to have a strong military is not a natural value. But it is needed, and the current government’s efforts to reinvest in our armed forces are a generation overdue.
While we do need to rearm, Canada’s military is not only a warfighting force. We were once important players in the world of peacekeeping, as well, and our armed forces are experts in the field of search and rescue. And, lest we forget, Mel Lastman once showed that the army can also clean up Toronto after a snow storm. Widely mocked for it at the time, it is a reminder that our military does more than simply fight foreign enemies.
During the Second World War, Canada became a military industrial powerhouse, producing tens of thousands of armoured vehicle, ships, and aircraft for the war effort. The industrial base became the base of an aerospace innovation industry that produced Canada’s first home-grown jet fighter, the Avro CF-100 Canuk, North America’s first commercial jet, the Avro C102 Jetliner, and the de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver and DHC-3 Otter, bush aircraft that still dominate our northern skies today, all within a few years of the war.
In 1959, John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government canceled and destroyed the Avro Arrow, a Canadian high altitude interceptor at the bleeding edge of technological progress at the time, to replace it with the American nuclear Boeing Bomarc missile, which remains the only nuclear weapon Canada has ever allowed to be deployed on Canadian soil. The record is fuzzy, but the government at the time argued that they did not a high altitude fighter and then the next year bought CF-101 Voodoos to do the same role from the Americans, and there is evidence of backroom pressure from the US to cancel the plane in exchange for an improved tariff situation.
Cancelling the Arrow caused damage to our aviation industry from which we never fully recovered. Ever since, starting with those Voodoos, we have relied almost exclusively on American aircraft for our air force, with the recent acquisition of the Airbus CC-295 Kingfisher for search and rescue being a rare exception.
More to the point, while Canada is an arms exporter, our own military is under-equipped, under-staffed, and under-funded for the threat environment we currently face.
We are, effectively, an American client state when it comes to our national defence. In a shooting war, while we have some of the best trained and most dedicated personnel on the planet, we don’t have the military infrastructure to last especially long. Our defence has long been premised on being part of a broad coalition of allies that include the United States in any military action.
What has substantively changed is that the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces is no longer aligned with their NATO allies; he is aligned with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Worse, Putin’s Russia does not reciprocate this alignment.
With Poland and Romania bringing NATO together to discuss the existential military threat to their sovereignty from Russia under Article 4, we have to consider what we would be able to do should either invoke Article 5. 4 requires an urgent discussion, but article 5 is the declaration that an attack on one member of the alliance is an attack on all. It has only ever been used once, following the September 11th attack against the United States. Should Poland or Romania invoke Article 5, Canada, along with the rest of NATO, could suddenly find ourselves at war with Russia and their increasingly strong alliances.
Can we trust the Americans to defend our sovereignty in that scenario? Or would they merely use our land as an extension of their own, trampling over our country as they set up defensive lines across our north? Moreover, can we trust the Americans under Trump to even join the allies against Putin’s Russia in such a hot war? Or would he instead trade Poland, Romania, or Canada away to Putin to prevent the war and claim his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize?
With the current rise of authoritarian regimes threatening our sovereignty and that of our allies, we are in a more precarious military situation than we admit to ourselves. The war in Ukraine should be seen as a warning to Canada and the rest of NATO that we need to be tangibly prepared.
We try to convince ourselves that the rules-based international order continues to function, and that we will be able to talk our way out of another major world-wide conflict. If anything, Ukraine exposes this as a dangerous fallacy.
While I have every faith that most of NATO would rally together should push come to shove, I am not confident that the United States under Trump will still have our back.
A frightening scenario