Commentary
Australia is building or buying 11 nuclear-powered submarines because of the looming threat of conflict with communist China. Whereas in Canada we’re still going “What’s conflict?” and “What’s communism?” and, within the Trudeau administration, “What’s China?”
In democracies there’s always a mix of good news and bad on defence. The Australian says, “The Australian Defence Force will be transformed into a more agile, lethal force, capable of mounting missile strikes and amphibious assaults far from the mainland under an ambitious blueprint to respond to China’s unprecedented military expansion.” But agile is a term planners use, like “lean,” when they intend to skimp on funding, so “despite ‘the most challenging strategic circumstances’ since 1945, the government is refusing to increase the Defence budget for at least four years and has deferred key multibillion-dollar decisions on the future of the navy’s surface fleet.”
What’s more, the
vaunted Aussie subs are on such a slow schedule it could be Canadian, so Xi Jinping will kindly not invade Taiwan or anything else for, say, a decade if quite convenient. Even so,
Australia’s navy dwarfs
ours in size and capacity.
By the way when discussing defence in democracies, you have to explain to an obtuse segment of the electorate that a “nuclear submarine” isn’t one that carries nuclear weapons. It has a nuclear power plant which dramatically improves performance, even if Australia’s Green party
called them “floating Chernobyls.” Canada, by contrast, bought
used diesel submarines from the UK back in 1998 that raise the further question, “What’s performance?”
They were only in British service for eight years before being peddled to Pakistan, which scorned them. Then Canada, having
cancelled its own nuclear submarine program lest it give us Arctic patrol capacity with the dreaded atomic energy, was tricked into paying $750 million for sub-standard vessels that have shown a Monty Pythonesque tendency to catch fire, tip over, and sink into the sea.
Speaking of incompetence, then-foreign minister Joe Clark opposed the nuclear subs because they would upset the balance of power with the Soviet Union. And elite wisdom here says we must never upset our enemies with our strength, though it’s fine to infuriate our allies with our weakness. As Justin Trudeau
did by admitting privately to NATO allies, though not mere citizens, that our longstanding promise to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP was a slippery lie.
I can’t find confirmation that Talleyrand said God gave diplomats tongues so they could conceal their thoughts. But when the U.S. ambassador to Canada
said it’s fine, really, we look to Canada for other things than money, I’m amazed this didn’t cleave to the roof of his mouth. There’s a reason Australia’s inside the new
AUKUS partnership with the United States and UK and we’re not even looking in (and Australia ditched planned French subs for American products and British designs).
So whither Canada? The Wikipedia entry on the feeble diesel subs we now plan to keep in lack of service for another eight years, to avoid facing reality or having a navy, ends that Naval Association of Canada analysis “indicates that the lead times, technical challenges and costs involved in submarine replacement would be significant were such a program to be initiated.” And our procurement is so feeble if we’d gone nuclear in 1998 we’d probably still be waiting for some Quebec shipyard to deliver an actual submarine. But the big issue is intellectual.
It’s easier to ignore threats than think through how to respond, let alone actually respond. And many cynical Canadians deplore American power while assuming we can play the global village idiot and rich strong Uncle Sam will protect us. Whereas the Australians were looking down a very real barrel back in 1942 when a Japanese invasion force was halted at Ioribaiwa, just 30 kilometres from
Port Moresby right across the Torres Strait from the Australian mainland, by the usual ramshackle Allied force. (U-boats cruised the St. Lawrence then too, but former PM Pierre Trudeau admitted to being ignorant of it then and later like, one assumes, his scion.)
The Australian says, “The government’s Defence Strategic Review, released on Monday, warns Australia’s strategic circumstances have ‘radically’ worsened, to the point that ‘we now face as a nation the prospect of major conflict in the region that directly threatens our national interest’.” And if Australians come to grips with the fact that an actual bang-bang dead-people war with China could happen, and end with conquest by communist tyrants, at some point they will decide to spend more on defence even if it means trimming back the free money that modern governments more or less exist to hand out, and hand out to exist.
Meanwhile Canada’s Laurentian elite struggles to grasp that wars, conquests, and communists are real. Which is why our submarines aren’t.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
