Years of Neglect

Parliamentary Neglect

Another kind of neglect is Parliamentary neglect. The underground royal commission found that very few members of Parliament closely followed, much less understood, defence issues. And this is a shame, because decisions about defence and security issues do, quite literally, have life and death consequences. As Professor Douglas Bland states in his foreward to The Chatter Box:

Canadians have come to expect that Parliament will be called to debate war and peace because few matters are more important when national security is threatened and the lives of members of the Canadian Forces may be on the line. Moreover, politicians, especially while in opposition, have often rightly made an enormous fuss over military failures in good order and discipline. Duty to Canada and the critical requirements of civil control over the military demand – as the commissioner of the inquiry into the deployment of the Canadian Forces to Somalia so eloquently wrote – “a vigilant Parliament.”

But what do Canadians get in moments of crisis? Most often they see a near empty House where a few members of Parliament, detailed for duty by their whips, deliver dreary dribble in somber, self-righteous tones. Ministers, even the principal ministers, often leave the Commons immediately after delivering their required remarks. The debates, if that is what they are meant to be, become rehearsed repetition of positions rather than a search for a national point of view. No greater disservice has ever been provided by so few to so many.

Roy Rempel, the author of The Chatter Box, worked on Parliament Hill as a foreign policy and defence advisor. He bemoans the scant attention paid to defence and national security issues…

Parliament has been left totally out of the loop in the decisions made to deploy Canadian Forces to help fight the war on terror. This is partly because the government knows that the Canadian Forces are seriously ill-equipped for the operations that they might be asked to perform. In December 2001 the auditor general noted that the Forces face about a $1 billion to $2 billion annual shortfall in the equipment and operations budgets. This means that Canadian military capability is eroding every year as old equipment is not replaced and the Forces are not permitted to train to the extent that is required to maintain combat effectiveness. In an extraordinary comment, the auditor general said that the government claims that the Forces are combat-capable should be “taken with a grain of salt.”

Small wonder that the government strongly resists any serious public discussion on defence issues that might further expose the state to which the Canadian Forces have been allowed to decline. Although in 2001 both Senate and House of Commons committees had been studying operational readiness issues for several months, these hearings and the damning conclusions of independent experts and the interim report of the House Committee in November 2001 generated only spotty media coverage. The media knew that no decisions of any import could be taken by a parliamentary committee.

….The lack of effective oversight is chronic and goes back years, perhaps decades. And it is in this absence of real oversight that one can begin to understand how it is that Canada has gradually seen its international influence erode and how it is that the Canadian Forces have fallen into the sad state in which they find themselves today.

To understand just how completely Canadian politicians and the Canadian public were unaware of the dangers our peacekeeping troops faced while serving in the former Yugoslavia, the following anecdote from Sergeant Jim Davis is instructive. This appears in The Chance of War.

We would get news clippings faxed to us over there. Most of them were military articles, and they’d be distributed amongst the units. One day one of them was from Marcel Masse, the famous Quebec politician. His memorandum to the entire Canadian Forces while we were in Sarajevo getting shot at every day was: “All bases in the province of New Brunswick will buy their maple syrup from Quebec producers, not from local New Brunswick producers."

I realized then that the Canadian public had no idea what was going on. We’re in Sarajevo getting shot at, people are having their feet blown off, we’ve lost Mike Ralph, we’re losing equipment all the time, the locals are getting killed left, right and centre, and the most important and pressing issue on the minister of national defence’s desk was where New Brunswick bases were getting their maple syrup. It was like, bang! You couldn’t have hit me any harder. I realized: they just don’t get it back there.