Canada's Navy

Well, whoops. It was a Liberal-led government that dismantled the pride of Canada's Armed Forces. Assembling the Navy, the Air Force, the Army into one great amorphous, like-uniformed mass. And slowly, gradually, began de-funding them. Until Canada's military no longer resembled what it once was.

What need, after all? Self-defence? We've never been directly threatened with invasion, have we?

Cold War? Well, that was an overseas thing, something for Europe and the United States to be concerned with. Of course there was NATO, and we were the first to join, backing up our neighbour which has always, because of geography, size, wealth, and international might, been Canada's back-up.

Which of our political parties has always been the perennial governing party? Right. And that pretty well explains the evaporation of funding for the Canadian military. Something that most Canadians were fairly comfortable with. We'd done our bit, during two costly, population-devastating world wars.

And most reasonable people believed that huge world conflagrations like that were over and done with. Kaput. They'd had their day. The international community could never envision another such great war that would pull into violent action so many countries of the world facing off against one another, like the Allies and the Axis.

Of course there was the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Cold War, and the incessant worries about the fallout of nuclear warfare that kept the two great world powers at loggerheads against one another. So what use were conventional weapons and a conventional military, in the face of that existential threat?

And then came international peacekeeping under the aegis of the United Nations. And there was Canada, all over the place, in Sinai, Cyprus, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and more. And which government was it that began to re-fund the Canadian military? Odd, isn't it, the Conservative government that pledged to re-build Canada's military into a modern force.

Unfortunately, it's costly. And Canada's focus, because of its force in Afghanistan with a very diminished resource was on the Army, while the Navy languished. So on the 100th anniversary of Canada's once-proud Navy which fought so valiantly during the Second World War, we see a greatly diminished force, squeezed with unstable and unpredictable funding.

While the Minister of National Defence asserts that "The government is committed to modernizing our frigates and refitting our submarines. Resources are being allocated to the navy that put it on the threshold of one of the most intensive modernizations of its fleet ever." Good to remind ourselves of a tight economy, and the imperatives of many funding obligations.

No navy was re-built in a hurry, other than during war, and we're not quite in that situation. We'll get there. Eventually - not war, but a refurbished navy.