Lanterna Rally

Author: Joel J. Sokolsky

Publisher:

Published: 2013-01-28

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9781482300185

A cynic might claim that Canada should have no difficulties adjusting to strategy during the lean years. In the first place, the Ottawa government has never had to worry about formulating its own national security strategy. Since confederation in 1867, in war and peace it simply adopted the strategy of its allies. And in the second, with the exception of the world wars and the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian Forces (CF) have known little else but lean times. Indeed, it has been charged that Canada began collecting its peace dividend? the first time the Cold War ended, during the detente of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For the last 20 years it has spent only 2 per cent of Gross National Product (GDP) on defense. The so-called commitment-capability gap has plagued the CF into the 1980s, while heightened peacekeeping duties have continued to place a strain on resources in the first 5 years of the post-Cold War era. The latest White Paper on defense, released in December 1994, seeks to chart a course that will allow Canada to better cope with the transformed international security environment that it faces abroad and the stark fiscal realities that it faces at home. These realities were brought home by the Federal budget reductions in February 1995. Here, too, the past practice may foster a measure of scepticism. The three previous White Papers, and the budgets to fund them, proved to be poor predictors of both global and domestic trends. Their policy prescriptions seemed to be more appropriate to the situations which preceded their release rather than those which followed. As a result, they had extremely short lives as guides to subsequent defense policy and force posture decisions.