COVID points to need for strong Canadian military.
COVID shows we can’t always depend on our allies
Write anything about Canadian military policy and you’ll inevitably get a reply from someone — polite and sincere, or very much neither — who wants to know why on earth Canada would spend a nickel on its Armed Forces. Don’t you know the Americans will protect us?
That’s one soothing thought that has gone unchallenged for far too long, and one that COVID-19, hopefully, will take some of the shine off of.
Here’s the thing: the Americans would defend Canadian territory from a foreign attack, or push hostile ships, subs or aircraft away from our coasts (maybe not all of the coasts, but the parts that are populated, and close to the United States border). But they’d do so in a time, place and manner of their choosing. If you don’t believe me, check out their comments this week about sharing vaccines with Mexico and Canada.
The issue was put before the White House through a Mexican request for assistance with securing vaccines. Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, gave a clear answer: no. “The administration’s focus is on ensuring that every American is vaccinated, and once we accomplish that objective, we’re happy to discuss further steps beyond that,” she said. “The next step is economic recovery and that is ensuring that our neighbours, Mexico and Canada, have similarly managed the pandemic so that we can open borders and build back better.”
This is a fantastically concise summary of an entirely reasonable policy: once America is vaccinated, to facilitate its own economic recovery, the U.S. will aid its closest trading partners. This makes perfect sense. And it should come as no surprise to us.
Any national government has to put its own interests first. Whatever ethical qualms this may raise will always get crushed by pragmatic expediency. That’s why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who once told the United Nations that, “We’re Canadians and we’re here to help” — chose to access vaccines made available to Canada via our participation in COVAX. The vaccine supply is currently a zero-sum game, meaning that those millions of doses will not be available to someone else — potentially a country far poorer than us. Yet we have every right to, and it’s good that Trudeau has chosen to. He’s putting Canadian interests first, as is his job.
And it’s exactly what any of our allies would do before coming to our aid. The scramble for vaccines today, and personal protective equipment during the first wave, is a gigantic red flag to Canadians who assume our close alliances with major world powers and our professed love of multilateralism means that our foreign friends will bail us out of any future crisis, or the remainder of this one, come to think of it. They would probably come to our rescue eventually, but on their schedule, and on their terms.
An American president probably will see value in getting the Mexican and Canadian economies back on their feet, once America’s needs are met. On Tuesday, Vicente Gonzalez, a Democratic congressman from Texas, told CNN that the U.S. should do its best to bail out Canada and Mexico once America’s needs are met.
“I believe once we inoculate the American population and people here in our region, it would be smart to assure that our friends and neighbours are also immunized,” he said. “North America is a very tight-knit community. We have relatives on both sides of the border, we do business on both sides of the border, whether it’s Canada or Mexico. And certainly I feel both of those countries, and many others around the world, should be inoculated.”
Again, this is entirely logical. And if by some quirk of fate it was Canada that was sitting on a huge stockpile of vaccine, our position would no doubt be very similar: every available dose will head south to help our friends, beginning the very moment that our own needs are met.
It feels a little odd to have to actually make this argument, to be honest. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain national interest — it’s fair to disagree with this as a policy, but it’s just outright bizarre to be surprised that it is the policy governments the world over are choosing. It’s not that our overriding assumption underpinning so much of our national policy — the Americans will defend us! — is wrong, exactly. It’s just that that defence might not take the form we would like, or that we might have to wait for the help to come. And the wait could be painful.
The basic truth of the matter is this: we can’t be half sovereign. We’ve had the benefit of a long run of relative geopolitical stability. The only major threat to our homeland since the Second World War was that of a nuclear attack during the Cold War, and there really wasn’t a ton that we could do about that. This allowed us to aggressively embrace weakness and incompetence in the fields of national defence and preparedness, and even perversely laud it as a type of fiscal virtue: look how much money we’re saving by counting on the Americans to do all the heavy lifting on continental defence. Gosh, aren’t we smart. Those suckers.
We ought to have woken up at some point during the last presidential administration; Canadians should not assume that America’s frustration with cheapskate allies was a quirk of the last president that he took with him as he walked out of the Oval Office. But we didn’t learn that lesson, and may well fail to learn it again: there are core defence capabilities, and public-health ones, that we have not bothered creating and sustaining, and when a once-in-acentury disaster struck, we were out in the cold with no helpful friend in sight.
The cost of investing in our Armed Forces and national preparedness more broadly — including public-health measures, among other things — would be significant, but are certainly not beyond our reach. We are a wealthy enough country to afford some reserve domestic capacity to produce vaccines and PPE, and to have a larger and more robust Armed Forces. Our lack of these things is not preordained, just a consequence of the policy choices we’ve made — we took the notion of automatic, timely U.S. aid to the bank, and chose to spend our money on other priorities. Do you feel well served by this bargain?