By David Scheidl, May 22, 2024
Great Britain faced a terrible challenge in the 1930s, a pre-war period of mounting geopolitical threats, complicated by budgetary constraints, economic doldrums, political naivete, and popular distaste for costly deterrence policies.
Britain’s then profusion of government committees dedicated to strategic affairs were confounded by cabinets and prime ministers who ignored or reduced their recommendations until it was nearly too late. As that decade unfolded, the lack of action to shore up shortfalls in industrial capacity and defence steadily increased the cost and personal sacrifice that were ultimately demanded from the British people and their allies.
Indeed, the British experience during that unhappy decade well illustrates how popular aversion and economic stagnation can constrain a state from taking deterrent action that would have lessened the chance of the very war they sought to avoid.
Today, Canada faces a similar challenge as Great Britain did in the years before the Second World War. In mid-2022, the British Army chief, Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders, first asserted that the then-recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia constituted a new “1937 moment.” Since then, it has become commonplace to warn that we have entered a pre-war period.
Recent Canadian strategic policies indicate we risk travelling a similar path as Britain did in the 1930s. Despite a new defence policy update, Canada will not meet the NATO benchmark for spending on defence. While this is an artificial benchmark, meeting our NATO spending pledge signals to allies and adversaries alike the seriousness with which we take the threat environment.
Indeed, some leading members of the alliance now view the current NATO benchmark as a minimum, given the stark shortfalls in Western defence establishments. Beyond signalling Canadian steadfastness, meeting the NATO benchmark would ease the military’s reconstitution efforts and better support its ability to become an effective fighting force again.
It is not just defence, of course. Our diplomatic service, according to a recent Senate report, has been undermined by “a lack of recruitment and investment in … capacities and capabilities over much of the past two decades.” Our intelligence services and industrial capacity appear to be suffering from similar neglect.
Canada needs a grand strategy to organize the pursuit of its core national interests. This essay follows from a previous one, which made the case for the sort of grand strategy Canada should adopt. However, creating a Canadian grand strategy is only the first step.
Grand strategy, in its most basic form, is the practice of marshalling limited means to achieve national ends. History warns that states that outstrip their resources in pursuit of their interests, however vital, tend to suffer defeat, decline and sometimes destruction. Decision-makers must be ruthlessly selective in designating core national interests, and ensuring the means to pursue them are developed and sustained.
Too many hard choices to address critical capability deficits in these instruments of national power are being pushed off until the 2030s. While some of the shortfalls plaguing our instruments of national power can be partly addressed through reforms, infusions of funding are necessary to rebuild these capabilities that Canada will require in the years ahead. Deficit spending will be unavoidable if we are to swiftly close the capability gaps to be prepared for the possibility of a major war.
In the longer view, however, Canada must build more durable national structures to support the development and sustainment of a grand strategy. Canada requires greater political will to make the case for permanently higher funding of our instruments of national power, as well as a more informed and supportive populace.
Further, Canada requires an expanded economy to draw in greater revenues that can support greater spending on defence, foreign affairs, intelligence and critical industry. Acquiring these interconnected structural supports is imperative to enable Canadian decision-makers to craft a sustainable grand strategy through which we can pursue our core national interests.
While Canada does require more money for its instruments of national power, this cannot be approached solely as a zero-sum effort to redistribute scarce dollars. Catalyzing greater Canadian growth that enables a better quality of life for citizens, and greater fiscal capacity to sustain our instruments of national power, should be the main aim.
The most recent IMF World Economic Outlook projects a worrying trend, with Canadian growth less than half of the United States, and also underperforming our Western peers. Our debt servicing costs for this fiscal year (projected at $54.1 billion) will outstrip the entirety of our annual defence budget, even if it grows as promised in the new defence update. An economy burdened with high debt and poor growth cannot sustain the higher resource commitment required to properly support our instruments of national power.
The best path forward is an economic revitalization program that focuses on vigorous growth and productivity for the Canadian economy. While a more prosperous Canada is a positive objective in itself, this program would specifically enable Canada to meet the needs of a grand strategy without outstripping our economic foundations.
Historically, states like Habsburg Austria that successfully pursued their grand strategies while overcoming similar constraints tended to concentrate on fostering economic productivity, improving the extraction and refinement of natural resources and carefully developing critical industries.
Core elements of the Canadian economy, such as energy, mining, forestry and agriculture, can be better exploited to enable internal prosperity and strategic economic synergies with friendly states. This would require a mix of regulatory reform coupled with a more strategic approach to exports.
The most obvious example would be Canada exporting liquefied natural gas to friendly states in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, blending greater prosperity here at home with improving the energy security of our allies.
More opportunities to combine economic prosperity and strategic interests exist in other sectors, such as helping to contribute to a more resilient continental defence industrial sector, and should be pursued.
Catalyzing Canadian economic growth should include the removal of interprovincial barriers to trade and commercial activity, which in 2021 were assessed to impose the equivalent of a 6.9 per cent tariff on goods across Canada. In essence, Canada must make it simpler and easier to do business and create a healthier commercial environment to foster improved and long-term prosperity.
Without mobilizing our economic resources and improving the structure of the Canadian economy, any Canadian grand strategy will be fatally undermined at the outset. Beyond the purely fiscal, continued economic stagnation at home drives a strategic socio-political vulnerability: It is difficult to make the case to the Canadian public that Canada has core national interests abroad that are worth defending, while Canadians are reeling from declining living standards, generational divisions, demographic tensions and acute spikes in criminality and anti-social behaviour.
Thus, even with a stronger economy, a Canadian grand strategy cannot be sustained without political willpower and popular support. Despite recent polling shifts, Canada lacks a robust national security culture that fosters an informed public and political class. In part this is because politicians and senior officials (with some exceptions) generally eschew serious public conversations about the grave geopolitical threats facing Canada or the increasingly lacklustre capacities of our instruments of national power.
Since the end of the Cold War, this has been a negative reinforcing cycle: little public interest leads to a lack of prioritization by Canadian decision-makers, which in turn leads to further public disinterest. Canadian leaders must define a strategic vision that articulates our core national interests, outlines the grand strategy to pursue those interests, and cultivate popular support for its implementation.
To develop a more robust national security culture in Canada, Canadian decision-makers must first foster better public threat awareness. A recent article by the Royal United Services Institute contends that the sort of challenge we must prepare for demands whole-of-society mobilization and unity in order to ultimately prevail.
Using Finland and Estonia as examples, the article notes that these states’ experience “seems to show that an awareness and understanding of a credible threat to their security, a belief in the capacity of their country to defend itself … and an understanding of what their role would be … are among the key factors increasing the willingness of citizens to defend their country.”
Other allied states such as Latvia and Lithuania provide excellent examples of what public-facing national strategy policies should accomplish. They grapple in plain language with the geopolitical threats facing each state, the broad strategy the state intends to undertake and are relatively detailed in sketching out for the public what policies the state will pursue.
Canadians too should be provided with blunt appraisals of the threats posed to their country and concrete strategic documents laying out what the government intends to do in response. Without a realistic understanding of the threats facing Canada and our core interests, Canadians are unlikely to support efforts to permanently dedicate significantly more resources to our instruments of national power.
According to the recent defence policy update, Canada is due to begin publishing a national security strategy on a four-year cycle to regularize strategic thinking and planning. This should be used as a tool to inform the public debate over core national interests and grand strategy.
Beyond the public-facing benefit, the main aim of such a process should be to reorient and revitalize government thinking and to regularize genuine strategic thought prior to budget and policy formulation.
It is a well-known challenge within government circles to convince senior officials, ministers and key staff to read strategy or assessment documents, much less to take the time to think through the implications of those documents and craft their policies and budget around them.
Matt Pottinger, writing about his experience on the U.S. National Security Council, articulated a “campaign plan” approach. These documents “were detailed lists of the concrete actions required of each department and agency to fulfill the objectives prescribed by the formal, more generally worded, presidential strategies.” Crucially, the plans contained deadlines for each action and sought to align annual budget requests to support the strategies.
The newly formed Canadian National Security Council (at present only a cabinet committee), and foreign and defence-related secretariats within the Privy Council Office, would do well to undertake a similar approach to enable the development and execution of a coherent grand strategy.
Canada must credibly, and sustainably, contribute to deterrence, while cultivating the necessary foundation to sustainably pursue our interests via our grand strategy over the long-term. This will require a strong economy able to support our instruments of national power, political leadership capable of crafting a strategic vision and an informed and supportive public.
Developing these will be made more difficult by the acute geopolitical challenges Canada faces in the short-term, especially the revisionist challenges posed by Russia and China that increase the likelihood of a major war. A disciplined balancing act between short-term threats and long-term sustainability is required of our senior leadership, without which we will run the grave risk of being unable to credibly defend ourselves, our core national interests and our allies.
David Scheidl is a civil servant and a member of the Canadian Armed Forces Primary Reserve. The views expressed herein are entirely personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the government of Canada or the Canadian Armed Forces.
