By Scott Taylor
For the sake of history, it needs to be remembered that Canada did not start the current spat with the United States. The blame lies entirely with US President Donald J. Trump.
Immediately following his re-election last November, Trump began ramping up his rhetoric in order to cast Canada as a 'nasty' trading partner and weak on border security. When Trump's initial fixation was on illegal fentanyl crossing the US border, Canada and Mexico were tarred with the same brush. This was despite the fact that less than .02 per cent of that drug trade crosses the Canadian border.
However, once Trump's focus shifted to trade deficits and tariffs it became clear that we are entering into an entirely new era globally. On Thursday, March 27, Prime Minister Mark Carney told the media: "Our biggest challenge as a country is becoming the most urgent. Over the coming weeks, months, and years, we must fundamentally reimagine our economy. We will need to ensure that Canada can succeed in a drastically different world. The old relationship we had with the United States—based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation—is over."
Carney made it clear that time is of the essence. "We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States,” he said. “We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere, and we will need to do things previously thought impossible, at speeds we haven't seen in generations."
For those in Canadian military circles this about-face in relations with our longstanding closest ally is a tough pill to swallow. Canada may not spend the NATO target goal of two per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence, but over the past 25 years our soldiers have spilled their blood supporting American led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We also helped to bomb the bejeezus out of Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2010 in support of US and NATO interests albeit those two interventions did not result in a single Canadian casualty.
Of course the immediate knee-jerk reaction from the military brain trust is to spend more on weapon systems but maybe partner with European suppliers instead of our usual US defence contractors.
I suggest that we take a closer look at what role Canada wants for our armed forces moving forward.
One example of a starkly different approach is practically next door to us and happens to be the third neighbour on our shared continent: Mexico.
The Mexican military is structured almost entirely for internal defence and security. Historically Mexico has remained extremely isolationist in terms of military force. During WW2 they did declare war on Germany and Japan and sent a small force to the Philippines.
In terms of UN Peacekeeping, Mexico has only ever sent a handful of soldiers to the mission in Haiti.
In total there roughly 340,000 personnel in the Mexican armed forces and the defence budget is $8.5 Billion (USD) or roughly 0.7% of Mexico's GDP.
One reason that Mexico gets such a big bang for their buck in terms of defence is that they are equipped for domestic operations as opposed to an expeditionary force. The Mexican Army does not have main battle tanks. They have armoured cars and Humvees.
The modest Mexican navy has five frigates along with roughly 130 smaller, fast coastal defence vessels. They have no submarines.
The Mexican Air Force has just eight really old F-5 fighter jets with one of those fighters dedicated to training.
In other words, the Mexican armed services are tailored to defeat the actual threat that they face which is that of criminal drug cartels. Since 2006 some 45,000 Mexican military have been deployed alongside federal and state police forces in that ongoing conflict. To date some 750 soldiers and 4,100 police officers have been killed battling the drug cartels.
If, as Prime Minister Carney stated, the days of "tight security and military cooperation" with the US is over, then we need to seriously rethink the entire structure of our military. What is the point of purchasing 88 F-35 fighter aircraft from the very nation that is threatening to annex Canada into becoming the 51st state? The US Air Force alone has 5,500 combat aircraft.
Are the 82 Leopard II tanks in the Canadian Army's inventory a tangible deterrent to any would-be invader of our nation?
Thank god that Canada is not battling well armed drug cartels like the Mexican military has to do. However, we can still be creative in re-thinking what constitutes 'defence' spending in Canada.
We could never spend enough to successfully stave off a US invasion.
However we could invest heavily in developing infrastructure in the Arctic as well as vastly expanding the reserves and equipping them for the role of natural disaster responders. Battling forest fires in British Columbia may not be as challenging as fighting a counter insurgency in Afghanistan. However, protecting Canadian natural resources and domestic infrastructure is far more morally noble than battling Afghans into submission in a war that the US Pentagon knew they could never win.
