Commentary

Photo by Ken Lin

Canada’s aerial ambassadors, the Snowbirds, pay tribute to the COVID-19 pandemic responders in Toronto, May 2020, as part of their cross-country Operation Inspiration tour.

COVID-19: The Canadian Armed Forces and Canadian Defence Policy

by Martin Shadwick

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The COVID-19 pandemic has, not surprisingly, generated or rekindled a host of important questions and issues. These include: (a) the extent to which Canada’s armed forces should be tasked to carry out a diverse array of domestic and international non-military and quasi-military missions, roles and responsibilities, including Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR); (b) the desirability, or otherwise, of the armed forces being increasingly tasked with such duties; (c) the capabilities, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of the Canadian military in such roles; (d) whether the relevant capabilities of the armed forces should be enhanced, either as part of an ‘across-the-board’ rejuvenation of Canada’s overall military capacity or on a ‘case-by-case’ basis in selected (i.e., medical) niches; (e) the relationship between the military roles, and the non-military and quasi-military roles, of Canada’s armed forces and the impact of the latter on the military raison d’être of Canada’s armed forces; (f) the existence, or otherwise, of synergies between the military, quasi-military, and non-military roles of the armed forces; (g) the relationship between the armed forces and other government departments and agencies, at all levels of governance, and between the armed forces and the private and volunteer sectors; (h) whether the military’s HADR and similar functions should be scaled back in favour of existing or new civilian actors; and (i) the budgetary implications of COVID-19 for DND and the Canadian Armed Forces in the face of burgeoning federal government expenditures to combat the pandemic.

Analysts have also pointed to the need, at the appropriate juncture, to review the roles and usefulness of the Canadian Armed Forces in responding to the demands of COVID-19. At the time of this writing, in early-May, the military’s role had evolved in a somewhat unexpected manner, being notably focused upon the provision of multiple, labour-intensive services to long-term care facilities—arguably the ‘ground zero’ of COVID-19 in Canada—in Quebec and Ontario. Such a review, which would ideally include a robust comparative component so as to identify best practices from other nations and their military establishments, could be a stand-alone effort, or could form part of a broader study of Canada’s overall national response to COVID-19. Such a study could also help to inform a broader review of Canada’s defence priorities and defence policy (i.e., an eventual successor to Strong, Secure, Engaged).

A valuable contribution to discourse on these issues has been provided by Adam P. MacDonald, a Ph.D candidate and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Security and Development at Dalhousie University, and Carter Vance, a graduate of Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy, in their Covid-19 and the Canadian Armed Forces: Overview, Analysis, and Next Steps, a Vimy Paper published by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute (CDAI) in April 2020. MacDonald and Vance were also participants in the CDAI’s May 2020 webinar, Pandemic Response: A CAF Sitrep on COVID-19 and Panel on the National Security Implications. Highly successful, the webinar drew an astonishing 615 registrants.

“As unprecedented as the COVID-19 pandemic is,” argue MacDonald and Vance, “it represents the continuation of a larger trend in terms of ever-increasing demand for CAF support to domestic emergencies. Answering these requests is perfectly reasonable, as providing assistance to civil authorities during domestic disasters or major emergencies is one of eight core missions of the CAF as outlined in the current defence policy. Furthermore, a recent poll by Ipsos, commissioned by the CDA Institute, indicates [nine] out of [ten] Canadians across the entire country are supportive of the CAF being called upon to assist governments in their flight against COVID-19. But such domestic demands question the organization’s ability to meet these requests alongside [other] defence duties.” Canada’s armed forces “will always be ready to defend Canada and help Canadians through a crisis, but are they properly mandated and should they be tasked with the increasing domestic duties they have been asked to take on? Is a more dedicated force, either functionally tasked to do so within the military, or a new civilian agency a better fit to meet the growing demand from domestic emergencies? These are questions that do not have easy answers. Further, they are not exclusively or even primarily questions of logistics, funding or technical capabilities. Above all, they are questions that must be answered by policymakers and the public at a more overarching political level and rest on fundamental beliefs about what their military is for [emphasis in the original].”

In advancing the case for a review of the domestic roles and responsibilities of Canada’s armed forces, MacDonald and Vance focus upon the need for a reassessment of core missions, the fiscal fallout from COVID-19, the overall security orientation, multi-hatting versus specialization and future options for emergency response both inside and outside of the armed forces.

DND 20200510SJZ006D001 by Aviator Zamir Muminiar

Members of the 35th Canadian Brigade Group (35 CBG) arrive at the Saint-Jean Garrison (Quebec) to receive geriatric care training for assisting in the COVID-19 recovery efforts as a constituent part of Operation Laser, 10 May 2020.

The 2017 defence policy statement, Strong, Secure, Engaged, identified eight core missions for Canada’s armed forces:

  • detect, deter and defend against threats to or attacks on Canada;
  • detect, deter and defend against threat to or attacks on North America in partnership with the United States, including through NORAD;
  • lead and/or contribute forces to NATO and coalition efforts to deter and defeat adversaries, including terrorists, to support global stability;
  • lead and/or contribute to international peace operations and stabilization missions with the United Nations, NATO and other multilateral partners;
  • engage in capacity building to support the security of other nations and their ability to contribute to security abroad;
  • provide assistance to civil authorities and law enforcement, including counter-terrorism, in support of national security and the security of Canadians abroad;
  • provide assistance to civil authorities and non-governmental partners in responding to international and domestic disasters and major emergencies; and
  • conduct search and rescue operations.

In the view of MacDonald and Vance, these core missions “…require being able to successfully operate within complex and fast evolving security environments, placing greater demands on the CAF on virtually all fronts, be that enhanced Search and Rescue capabilities, contributions to NATO missions, and increased calls for support to combat natural disasters and other emergencies at home. As well as modernizing much of its forces to operate in existing domains, the CAF is developing new capabilities and competencies in emerging ones such as space and cyber. Even with the expansion of the force in terms of personnel, is it reasonable to expect the CAF can fulfill all of these core missions, especially during periods of simultaneous, large-scale strain on multiple ones?”

The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand/880025

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, 1988.

The latter, in some respects, goes to the crux of the matter and is, in fact, reminiscent of the questions posed during the debates in the 1980s over the infamous “commitment-capability gap”—a gap that the Mulroney government attempted to bridge through a combination of commitment reductions and capability enhancements in its ill-fated white paper of June 1987. If the commitment-capability gaps of the 1980s and the 2020s shared or share some potential solutions—an ‘across-the-board’ increase in the capabilities of Canada’s armed forces, the elimination of selected commitments/core missions or some combination of the two—they also differ in some noteworthy respects. Today’s “core missions,” six, seven’ and eight, for example, received relatively-little attention in the 1987 white paper, and rarely figured in any meaningful way in the 1980s debate regarding how best to resolve the commitment-capability gap. Similarly, the resolution of today’s perceived gap could prove more challenging, given a geostrategic and geopolitical environment that is arguably more stressed and more complex than that of the mid-to-late 1980s, and given the massive amount of government funding consumed by COVID-19 and related pressures upon the public purse. Today’s environmental security and Alternative Service Delivery landscapes also differ noticeably from those of the mid-to-late 1980s. Nevertheless, reviewing current Canadian defence dilemmas through a commitment-capability gap-style lens could prove instructive in 2020, and could open the door to some salient questions and potentially innovative approaches. For example, precisely how much of the current and projected load on the Canadian Armed Forces is attributable to core missions six, seven, and eight? Similarly, would harmonizing and prioritizing the core missions—military, quasi-military, and non-military—around home defence, with a somewhat reduced international role, generate some interesting options?

MacDonald and Vance observe, and I believe correctly, that the fiscal implications of COVID-19 for defence are “uncertain.” Strong, Secure, and Engaged “…includes many ongoing and expensive budgetary commitments for a host of new assets, competencies, and augmenting the size of and benefits to the Regular and Reserve forces. Given the huge fiscal burden the Federal Government is currently bearing to combat COVID-19”—and, one might add, the unknowable additional burdens of a potential second wave of the current pandemic or a new outbreak—“it is unclear what the future of current procurement projects will be, such as the National Shipbuilding Strategy, and planned but unbudgeted ones, such as the North Warning System replacement and new fighter aircraft. This is not even considering other multi-billion-dollar asset replacements such as submarines, where a decision is needed soon if there is to be no capability gap. Financial strain in government and the CAF may require re-organizing not just in asset priorities but more fundamentally in missions as well.”

Given the long-established tendency of Canadian governments, of all political stripes, to fight deficit and debt problems by, in part, significant reductions in defence spending, one might wish to ‘brace for the worst.’ After all, the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney fiscally eviscerated its own white paper on defence in April 1989—less than two years after its release, and before the end of the Cold War. Similarly, the fiscal economies mandated by Jean Chrétien’s Liberals in the early-to-mid 1990s led to substantial cutbacks in defence spending and reductions in military and civilian personnel, as well as the loss of numerous units, installations, and capabilities. Nor will public opinion come to the rescue of the Canadian Armed Forces and defence-related capabilities. For the foreseeable future, Canadians and their elected representatives are going to be infinitely more interested in the health of the country’s medical-industrial base than its defence-industrial base. Moreover, as the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hebert has reminded us, public opinion polls are already “showing a shift in voters’ priorities, with climate change taking more of a back seat not only to the economy but also to health care.” If such vital and visible public policy issues as climate change and the environment have been eclipsed by the economy and health care, one can well imagine how low defence has sunk.

Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo/HX5C50

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, 1994.

Some observers have posited that the Trudeau government’s apparent willingness to increase the deficit and the debt may spare DND the swingeing cuts seen during the Mulroney and Chrétien eras. It could also be argued that some conceivable cutbacks—such as cancelling the last three Canadian Surface Combatants, or dropping the projected fleet of new fighter aircraft from 88 to the Harper-era figure of 60—would not generate substantial savings in the short term. Cuts that would generate savings in the short term—in personnel, operations and maintenance, infrastructure, existing capabilities (i.e., heavy armour?) and procurement—could be a very different story.

If massive reductions in defence spending do materialize due to COVID-19, they could raise fundamental questions about the raison d’etre—and hence, the capabilities and force structure—of the Canadian Armed Forces. Readers will recall that, in the wake of Canada’s experience in the Gulf War of 1990-1991, some argued that Canada needed (and could afford) only two combat-capable services—typically, the navy and the air force—and that the army could safely be reduced to a constabulary suitable for such tasks as light peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and aid of the civil power. If today’s alternative to such scenarios is to ‘spread the fiscal pain’ equally between all three services—thereby producing three miniature services with sharply- limited and arguably-dubious combat capabilities—variants of the ‘constabularization’ paradigm could re-emerge. Some Canadians might, in fact, opt for the constabularization of all three services in light of COVID-19-type domestic emergencies, and a perceived need to bolster military resources to deal with climate change-related HADR requirements.

The authors of the Vimy Paper also make an important contribution to the discussion with the observation that “…there must be the avoidance of seeing military personnel as hyper-competent and multi-purpose agents which can do any task set before them, thus being used as a backstop for any and all challenging situations. The CAF is a not a [Swiss] army knife which can be expected to take on and competently execute multiple, simultaneous duties in a complex security environment.” While “…the CAF can be employed in jobs that are either layperson-level in training and/or commensurate with their training (such as engineering and logistics) in supporting domestic crises, there needs to be an investigation as to whether these types of security challenges require more refined, specialized skills sets, [possibly] necessitating the creations of new capabilities to meet these demands.”

DND photo by Corporal Geneviève Beaulieu

A number of medical personnel from 2 Field Ambulance, CFB Petawawa, arrive at Saint-Jean Garrison (Quebec) to assist in different residential and long-term care facilities during Operation Laser, 4 May 2020.

One “…possible area for such in-CAF specialization…could be the Reserve Force.” The “relationship between the reserve and regular forces differs among the three services, but a case could made that if the CAF were to continue to support growing demands associated with domestic emergencies then perhaps the reserves should become a more functional capability charged with these duties exclusively. Alternatively, an additional reserve service could be constructed with distinct trades and training specifically oriented towards disaster management and domestic emergencies support. Such possibilities could help insulate the Regular Force in order to focus on other defence duties while allowing the Reserves, or a subset of these, to focus on domestic emergency support.” These are intriguing suggestions, albeit suggestions that could potentially have a number of troubling implications for Canada’s overall military capability. Although the contexts, roles, and timeframes differ, it would also be prudent to take note of the recruitment, retention, and morale issues that accompanied the Militia’s nuclear-age “national survival” role in the 1950s and early-1960s.

DND photo by Aviator Dustin J. LeVasseur Pearce

Lieutenant-Colonel James Stocker, Commanding Officer of Territorial Battalion Group 1, is assisted in removing his personal protective equipment by Jane Smith, Executive Director of the Altamont Case Community in Scarborough, Ontario, 24 April 2020. Lieutenant-Colonel Stocker was a member of the CAF team that was meeting with representatives of various care facilities to assess their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Beyond the CAF and existing emergency management organizations at the provincial and municipal levels,” posit MacDonald and Vance, “Canada may need to consider building a civilian disaster response agency at the federal level which rapidly deploys when authorities are overstretched and that is specially constituted for this task (akin to the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency).” Such “…a move would not necessarily erase the CAF’s mission to be prepared to support, but rather create an intermediary federal organization more specialized and organically-linked to existing [emergency] management organizations which could be better suited to assume such duties and allow the CAF to largely retain focus on their traditional defence duties.” This, too, is an interesting suggestion, but one that could generate fears of increased bureaucratization and angst over the loss of much of the domestic role of the armed forces.

“For too long,” argue MacDonald and Vance in their conclusion, “the question of what Canadians expect from their military, and to what extent they are comfortable with military personnel operating on the Homefront in peacetime, has gone without serious consideration. Rather, this drift into serving as the de facto disaster response option for the federal government has been a result of reflexive policy-making without a clear vision of the future.” There is a measure of truth in this conclusion, but we would do well to recall, for example, that public opinion polling data extending back multiple decades reveals consistently high levels of public support for the disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, search and rescue, and similar roles of Canada’s armed forces. The “de facto disaster response option” assertion is intriguing, but there is also evidence that Canadian governments and politicians have been pilloried on more than one occasion for a perceived reluctance to summon military assistance.

Martin Shadwick has taught Canadian Defence Policy at York University for many years. He is a former editor of Canadian Defence Quarterly, and he is the resident Defence Commentator for the Canadian Military Journal.

HS88-20220-0033-159 by Mona Ghiz

HMCS Moncton departs the Halifax dockyard, 16 April 2020, and heads out to sea to remain in Nova Scotia waters in order to assist Canadians in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where and when needed.