‘ Trigger puller’ takes defence post
New cabinet minister a decorated lieutenant- colonel in Armed Forces
Many defence ministers pose for photos with military hardware, but few pull off the true badass combat stance as well as Harjit Sajjan — draped in flak jacket and camouflage, gripping an assault rifle on an actual battlefield.
Sajjan was, until recently, a decorated lieutenant- colonel in the Armed Forces, the first Sikh Canadian to command an army regiment.
“Command breaks down barriers because no one looks at what you look like when the bullets are flying,” he said in 2011. “Having to carry your, you know, wounded soldiers off the battlefield, not just wounded, but the ones that have been killed and place them into a helicopter, nothing prepares you for that.”
Sajjan, sworn in Wednesday as Canada’s new Minister of National Defence, was, in military lingo, “a trigger puller.”
He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and three times to Afghanistan, for which he was awarded one of the military’s highest recognitions, the Order of Military Merit, for reducing the Taliban’s influence in Kandahar.
“He has a taste for the reality of war and that’s very, very important,” said David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
“He will have seen the aftermath of the effect of war on some of our men and women, which is a major issue with veteran’s affairs,” said Bercuson.
Although few details of Sajjan’s military service are widely known, his personal story has brought accolades of being a “war hero” and a “trailblazer.”
Now 44, he arrived in Canada from India with his parents at the age of six. His father worked in a mill and his mother picked berries with an eye to supporting their children through school.
He served as a reservist, and was deployed with the Canadian peacekeeping forces to Bosnia in 1996.
In 2006 he served in Afghanistan, playing a key intelligence advisory role to Brig.- Gen David Fraser in the successful Operation Medusa offensive against the Taliban.
He was named commander of the B. C. Regiment ( Duke of Connaught’s Own), in 2012.
Sajjan’s hands- on combat experience will be appreciated by soldiers, but it also comes with some baggage, said Jack Granatstein, a military historian and fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
“His appointment will be cause for enormous joy within the reserves and of substantial concern within the regular force,” said Granatstein. “There currently is, and there has been for, well, forever, tension between the reserves and the regs,” he said.
There are many measures of a minister, but when it comes to grassroots knowledge of military service, Sajjan replaces Jason Kenney who, before politics, was president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
The two ministers before Kenney were both lawyers.