Jack Granatstein: Canadians Keep Electing Bozos Prime Minister ... That's Led to a Broken Military

From CJAD (Feb. 22, 2004):

Historian Jack Granatstein spreads the blame widely in answering the title question of his new book: Who Killed the Canadian Military?

Two generations of politicians and a complacent electorate have left the Canadian Forces a decrepit, dispirited group and it will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild them, Granatstein writes. His slim, 245-page, self-described polemic, lays out an indictment of years of neglect and misunderstanding.

Unlike many critics, who tend to focus much of the blame for military decay on Pierre Trudeau and his successors as prime minister, Granatstein, as a historian might be expected to do, reaches much farther back. He goes all the way to John Diefenbaker and then castigates each successive prime minister.

"We're dealing with a succession of catastrophes here, beginning in about 1960 and rolling through to the present," he said in an interview.

"The point of my book is to say you get what you pay for," he said. "The real problem is the political leaders . . . and the real problem is the people of Canada keep electing those bozos to office.

"If we want a real military we have to elect governments that will give it to us."

Granatstein, a retired historian, author of more than 60 books, former head of the Canadian War Museum and a one-time military officer, says politicians have succeeded in bamboozling Canadians about peacekeeping.

Canadians love blue-beret peacekeeping, he writes, but fail to recognize that traditional UN peacekeeping has been transformed into dangerous peacemaking in places such as Afghanistan.

"Canadians do not realize that the major reason the Canadian Forces have proven themselves capable of peacekeeping is that the nation trains its men and women for war."

He also says many Canadians have fooled themselves into thinking that a reputation as a tolerant, generous, even-handed country will protect them in a dangerous world. It won't.

The book runs through a list of prime ministers, from Diefenbaker to Jean Chretien, assigning each a share of the blame for allowing the military to decay with dwindling budgets and falling manpower levels.

He admits that under Trudeau, the Forces got new tanks, warships and fighter-bomber aircraft. But in general, he said, things got worse.

"The overall decline in equipment under Trudeau was catastrophic. The budgets sagged. Yes, there were big programs, but everything else rotted away."

The era of Brian Mulroney brought new hope to the military, but those hopes were dashed because the prime minister talked better than he acted.

"Mulroney sounded as if he would have done a lot better and the sense of betrayal was that much sharper."