Canada’s soft peacekeeping pledge

As promises go, Canada’s pledge last week to actively rejoin the ranks of the world’s peacekeepers hardly qualifies as a heart-stopper. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment was delivered in Vancouver at an international United Nations summit on peacekeeping, which was attended by defence ministers from around the world.

In his address, Trudeau offered a series of what he called “smart pledges” that will ensure Canada’s renewed involvement in peacekeeping will place this country’s resources where they are needed most, in the most timely manner possible.

“Canada is re-engaged in peacekeeping and we’re doing so in a way that is focused on how we can have maximal impact,” he explained.

It would not be unfair to say the PM’s statement - which delivers in a rather vague manner on an election campaign promise to return Canada to blue-helmeted duties - was neither wildly ambitious nor specific. The most noteworthy of the “smart pledges” is the creation of a rapid-reaction team of 200, part of Canada’s previously promised overall commitment of 600 troops and 150 police officers for peacekeeping missions.

Canada will also provide expertise, airlift capability, tactical support and equipment to peacekeepers from other countries. But exactly where this personnel, hardware and knowledge will be deployed remains to be seen and, according to Trudeau, will eventually be decided mostly by the UN rather than Canada.

However, what is certain is that in terms of sheer numbers, Canada’s contribution to peacekeeping will remain at its lowest level in at least a quarter of a century.

Reaction to Trudeau’s announcement was, not surprisingly, mixed. Retired general Romeo Dallaire, whom the PM introduced as part of a new global initiative aimed at ending the recruitment of child soldiers, called the government’s return-to-peacekeeping plan “very progressive,” but another high-ranking retiree, former major-general Lewis MacKenzie, dismissed the effort as disappointing and condescending.

“‘We’re going to throw money at the training, we’re going to throw money at modest resources, but the rest of you do the heavy lifting’ - that’s pretty superior coming from people who aren’t doing much peacekeeping these days,” MacKenzie, who headed Canada’s peacekeeping force in Bosnia, said in a television interview.

If there’s anything truly admirable to be found in Trudeau’s peacekeeping-plan revelation, it’s Canada’s $21-million commitment to an effort to increase the number of female peacekeepers - a strategy rooted in the increasingly widelyheld view that gender equity plays a part in breaking down barriers in the field.

But that’s the beginning and end of any flirtation with ambition contained in the PM’s peacekeeping pledge. Gone, it seems, are any dreamy Pearson-era nostalgic notions of a return to Canada’s glory days as the world’s pre-eminent peacekeeper. Those were handy on the campaign trail, when Trudeau was seeking to position himself as the purveyor of a kinder, gentler military mind than that of the comparatively hawkish Stephen Harper.

Time has passed, and political practicalities have intervened.

Canada will return as a peacekeeper by only the most modest of definitions.