John Robson: Canada Must Be a Reliable Security Partner for Its Allies

People watch a video featuring China's Liaoning aircraft carrier at the Military Museum in Beijing on March 3, 2024. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

At some point Canada must have an election. And for any hope of becoming a serious country, the ballot question must be “How can we become a reliable security partner for our Western allies?” Not whether. How.

I acknowledge other crucial contenders like “How can Canada avoid insolvency?” Or “How can Canada restore the family?” But precisely because of our penchant for ignoring vital matters, we must start with the most important and most urgent, namely security.

The core duty of the state is to protect the polity. As John Locke said, our entire political system is a bargain among citizens to secure our natural rights by creating an authority to whom we delegate that task and the requisite powers. So clearly that authority must protect the bargain itself or it doesn’t matter what else we agreed to.

In 1940 the Netherlands declared neutrality and was conquered by Hitler in five days. And it didn’t matter an “oehoe” what kind of laws the Dutch would have preferred, how much social spending or state-sponsored murder, until somebody else who had not failed to protect their own rule space showed up and restored the Dutch one. Which was, in large part, Canadians. (Owls go “oehoe” in Dutch; but for nearly five years theirs went “hu hu.”)

Security is also the most urgent because, for all its current tragicomic failings, there is no responsibility the Canadian state is duffing more flagrantly. Including recent news that they followed up culpable sluggishness on brazen in-your-face espionage in our top security biohazard lab with protracted in-your-face concealment of it from citizens.

We cannot expect our allies, whatever their security deficiencies, to tolerate us as an AUKUS or Five Eyes partner when we’re complicit in Chinese communist espionage. And international drug smuggling. And money-laundering, much of it again linked to communist China and involving not just numbers flickering on currency-trading screens but hockey bags full of banknotes in casino parking lots.

The recipient goes in, buys chips in cash, then cashes them in for a “legitimate” cheque and buys, say, a Vancouver mansion on a student’s income. And nobody seizes their accounts, unlike a truckers’ convoy that honked for freedom. Charles Burton among others has tirelessly exposed such shenanigans. But to authorities who don’t want to act, and citizens who don’t make them.

Instead, we assiduously import other people’s wars. Justin Trudeau and his Italian counterpart were just chased away from a public facility in downtown Toronto by Hamas backers, and security wilted. I may struggle to salute the rank not the man, but a serious country does not see its prime minister flee terrorist supporters through our city streets.

Speaking of saluting, trans-partisan contempt for defence over five decades has left us at 1.3 percent of GDP and thumbing our noses at our NATO allies, not our enemies. Yemen’s Houthis just sank a fertilizer freighter, and we fret about environmental harm rather than the worst threat to freedom of the seas since Napoleon (except U-boats in two world wars). And when the United States and Britain fire live ammunition in the Red Sea, we fire rhetoric and send three bureaucrats in khaki.

In the coming showdown with China, Iran, and North Korea, and the unfolding one with Russia, our allies, primarily America, may summon the will then the means to win the proxy and even direct wars, defend us, and restore global order. And it might seem seriously cunning, if disreputable, to then ignore the problem because self-interest leaves them no choice. But in the best-case scenario (and remember, worst is the West succumbs without fighting and second-worst it fights and loses) we will be held in angry contempt by “allies” we abandoned cynically or idiotically.

So the long-term consequences of being seen in foreign capitals as sanctimonious fools will be even worse than the short-term ones, which are no joke. When France recklessly threatens to send troops to Ukraine, think anyone cares what Canada says?

It does not add gravitas that we’re avoiding voting because Jagmeet Singh calls Justin Trudeau a plutocrats’ puppet then props him up because of a pharmacare deal that is not a deal on pharmacare. But when we get one, what will we be debating?

The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc will campaign against Pierre Poilievre the big mean man and ignore security. The PPC is libertarian/isolationist. And Poilievre, trying to finesse poll-driven support for budget-busting, family-destroying social programs with “right-wing” rhetoric, has been given ample opportunity to pledge 2 percent of GDP on defence, and offered unserious evasion not serious commitment.

Still, if we’re doomed, it’s not by fate. We’re a self-governing people, so if we’re governed by imbeciles, in Tom Hanks’ memorable words from “The Burbs,” it’s not them, it’s us.

Are we serious voters? Are we serious citizens? That is the question.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.