Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now-famous Davos speech has put a Canadian Prime Minister in a position not seen since former prime minister Lester Pearson’s attempt in 1956, as one of the “Three Wise Men,” (along with Gaetano Martino of Italy and Halvard Lange of Norway) to reform NATO by expanding Articles 2 and 3 to include economic and industrial cooperation within the alliance’s remit. Pearson failed. And he failed due to the lack of Canadian strategic vision and the parochial nature of Canada’s security environment. Wracked with regional, provincial, special-interest and party politics – each taking primacy over international security considerations – Pearson’s vision was soon forgotten, rebuffed across the country with the question of “What does it do for me?”
Without a compelling, unifying national defence answer the desire to see a more internationalist defence and security policy slowly died on the altar of consumerism, band wagoning under the American defence cloak, and a superioristic strategic culture built on distance, affluence and a constant cry for sovereignty being a geographically, not systemically, derived condition.
If Canada’s strategic culture – from the individual citizen level to the toxic corridors of power in Ottawa – rife with personal agendas, regional antagonisms and bureaucratic legacy systems that reject the need for international primacy over provincial influence on defence and security questions, does not change radically and quickly, the call to arms Carney has sounded from the mountaintops of Europe will echo into the sunset.
Why Canada has never had to think strategically
Canada has never had to think for itself strategically in all its existence. As part of the British Empire, despite what nationalist histories – and historians driven by the need to create a national identity myth of the heroic homegrown statesman – might like to think, Canada operates within defined strategic parameters, guided and supported by the imperial system. After World War II, and with the emergence of American leadership during the Cold War, the easy money, easy defence and easy decisions of a bipolar world created a new external compass for Canadian strategy.
By the end of the Cold War, the NATO alliance and North-South economic and trade links had created a set of operating principles that made true strategic thinking and decision-making unnecessary. Nor were the apparatuses of a truly independent state – middle power or not – required in terms of military and security capabilities and structures. Unarmed and unorganized for the great-power competition environment Carney now refers to, Canada, for the first time in its history, will have to learn to think and create power of its own strategic volition, for its own strategic purposes.
Even as part of a new middle-power club that requires collaboration and cooperation, the United States’ role as the driving force behind this newfound need for greater autonomy in thought and deed with regard to security, will now force a change in Canada’s strategic culture. Otherwise, Canada will fail to achieve the sovereignty and preparedness, the attraction and respect, now required if it is to maintain its standard of living – or indeed perhaps even its territorial boundaries.
The Arctic testing ground
The Arctic is a contested space, and law and international order are no longer guarantors of the current division of that space. It is a battle space: militarized by Russia; sought after as a trade route by great powers; used by China as a means to exert influence and compel European powers to recognize the growing global scope of its maritime power; and an area increasingly vulnerable to predatory or transient powers searching for shorter sea lanes of communication, natural resources, protein and geostrategic advantage. As the Arctic’s rise as a contested space takes it from a national or regional issue to one of international importance, Canada is forced to think both more long-term and more seriously about power – and how it is used, not only to defend but also to deter and coerce.
Economic power as a cornerstone of a new strategic culture
Canada’s primary weapon will not be military power. It will be economic power – derived from political stability, natural resources and geographic advantage; from an educated and organized workforce; and from an alliance of financial and trading partners, not just military ones – that can network economic power for the collective good in both offensive and defensive operations. This economic power, along with the military power needed to protect the ability to generate it, requires national coordination, not regional and provincial fiefdoms.
Historically, Canada’s industrial, commodity, and wealth-generation policies have been shaped by internal barriers designed to protect one region from another. In an era of intensified geopolitical competition, these arrangements will need to be reworked in favour of genuinely national industrial and trade strategies if Canada is to avoid becoming, as Mark Carney warned in Davos, “on the menu” in international affairs.
The creation of power Canada needs to contribute to the new world order Carney envisions therefore requires a new Canadian strategic culture. That is the first order of business for him and his government, if the Davos speech is to be anything more than just a speech.
So, in the tradition of the “Elbows Up” metaphor – the first rallying cry against the American rupturing of the international rules-based order in which Canada had lain secure for so long in – it is now time to “Drop the Puck!”