Air University Review, January-February 1967

The Fundamentals of Canadian Defense
and Foreign Policy

Dr. W. L. Morton

Foreign and defense policies are an expression of the characteristics of the country following them. This fact is perhaps more true of Canada than is generally so. The characteristics of Canada, though little understood even by Canadians, are especially marked.

The first of these is its territorial size. Canada is, in territory, the third largest country in the world, greater in extent than the United States. Much of this extent is not inhabited and is occupied only in the strictly legal sense of being under Canadian jurisdiction. But by one of the many ironies of the new age, even mere space is significant, and Canada has to shape its policies to take account of its spaces, however empty, and however undesired by others. The reason is simple: space may now be traversed by intercontinental planes and missiles.

Second, Canada, although a continental country, is curiously riverine and insular in character. Its great rivers, particularly the Saint Lawrence, and their great oceanic indentations, especially the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and Hudson Bay, have determined its economic and even its political history. One province is half insular, another significantly so, and a great portion of Canada’s territory consists of the Arctic Archipelago. These attributes modify its continental character and help explain its partly maritime nature and the importance of its ties with the rest of the world.

Third, Canada is not only vast and fragmented, it is in the greater part waste—waste only occupied here and there at ports or mineral areas, or waste never likely to be occupied by modern man. The extent to which this is so is seldom realized. Two things explain it. One is the extent and character of the Canadian Shield, a glaciated peneplain of archaic rocks, rich only in water and minerals. The other is the arctic and subarctic, which with repeated glaciation and climate make the northern territory capable of maintaining life only in the most stunted forms, or in the case of the maritime mammals, the polar bear and the seal, in limited numbers, or in the case of the caribou in marginal and easily disrupted circumstances. Most of Canada is therefore permanent waste.

The result of this enormous central fact is that there are narrow and severe limits on habitable land and on population growth. Even with the growth of industry and the provision of vast amounts of power, as will happen in Canada, checks on the growth of population will continue to operate. It is the Sweden, not the Germany, of North America.

From these characteristics arises the central paradox of Canada: that it has a vast territory and a relatively small population (20, 000,000), that it is a great trading community and a small power.

The character of the Canadian economy derives from the nature of its territory. It is still, as it always has been, primarily a trader of primary products. The great economic staples of fish, timber, and wheat are the Canadian equivalents of American cotton, tobacco, and wheat. But there is this difference, that despite a great industrial development, particularly since 1940, secondary production has never submerged the earlier staples to the degree that has occurred in the United States. And Canadian secondary industry, if it is to acquire the major markets that make the economics of mass production possible, must to a great extent find them abroad. Thus the emphasis on export trade remains, even with industrialization.

The present century has, of course, seen some changes in the nature of the export staples. Pulp and paper have been added to lumber in the forest industry. Minerals, oil, gas, and power have been added to wheat (still and for the foreseeable future a major staple), and there is even talk of exporting water.

It follows that much of Canadian external policy has to do with trade. Canada is indeed firmly set in the British tradition that the policy of the state must be to help create conditions favorable to trade, to win and protect markets, and to make trade, not ideology or other preference, the principal guide of foreign policy. Even military policy must be subordinated, both in its costs and in its objects, to this overriding consideration. For the economic life of the country is almost wholly dependent on trade abroad, not as drastically as is that of a commercial island but certainly in the sense of maintaining an achieved level of prosperity.

Since the 1920’s, and particularly since 1945, the continuing and growing deficit in Canadian trade with the United States makes this emphasis on external trade even more important. For it is only by dividends earned by American firms and the sale of raw materials and manufactured goods to the United States, and by borrowings in the American money market, that that deficit is financed. It is also by the earnings of foreign trade that the deficit is in part met.

The enormous American investment in Canada and American ownership of the larger part of Canadian industry as well as of many of its developed natural resources raise some question of Canadian economic independence. This is a matter of serious concern to many Canadians today. It does little, however, to alter the character of the Canadian economy. Occasionally, friction has occurred because some American-owned and -managed firms have declined to take advantage of Canada’s trading with Cuba and Communist China. The matter is one of a certain delicacy. Foreign-owned companies, of course, come under the law of the country in which they operate. They are under no obligation to follow its policies, but have no right to thwart them by positive action.

It was the same spirit, born of the same necessity, that led Canada, after years of trouble with heavy annual carry-overs of wheat, to seize the chance to make very large sales of wheat to the U.S.S.R. and Communist China, as well as to Cuba and Poland. By 1966 these sales quite overshadowed the traditional export markets for wheat in Britain and western Europe and replaced the worry of carry-overs with that of failure to meet commitments. Nothing could better illustrate the nonideological character of Canadian economic policy, a character sprung from the necessity to export as extensively as opportunity offers.

The military side of Canadian external policy is of much the same kind. Canada has never been able to stand alone, or even think of doing so, in any war in which it was engaged. And rarely, if ever, has it been able to avoid being drawn into a war in which its political, economic, and neighboring associates were engaged. This is because Canada has always been, one might say has always had to be, dependent on some form of association in military matters as it is dependent on foreign trade in economic matters. As it lacks the population to create a major internal market, it equally lacks the manpower and the industry to be a major military power. Yet because of the nature of its economic ties, Canada has always found it difficult, in fact impossible, to practice isolation.

This military dependence has always, of course, been political and sentimental as well as economic. It began in the French Empire and continued through the British. In one way or another the colonies that became the Dominion of Canada in 1867 were involved in all the major wars of France and England, from King William’s War to those against Napoleon. The last they might largely have avoided, of course, had it not been for the War of 1812 with the United States, but that conflict is another example of how Canada has tended to be a pawn in conflicts not of its own making. For a century thereafter Canada had little part in England’s wars, neither in the Crimea nor in the colonial wars of England. It knew a century of practical isolation based on the settlement of 1817-18 between Great Britain and the United States.

In that century the British North American colonies advanced to self-government and union (Newfoundland excepted). In managing their own affairs they were encouraged, and after 1871 left, to look after their local defense under the general protection of British naval power and British prestige. When therefore their participation was sought in the Boer War in 1899, Canadians were surprised and divided. A compromise in which actual participation by volunteers was allowed, without further commitment by the government, met the issue for the moment but did not settle it. A decade of debate revealed that Canada was still part of one undivided diplomatic and military state, the British Empire. When that Empire was at war as a result of decisions made in London, Canada was at war. To what extent Canada would participate, only enemy attack (most unlikely) or the Parliament of Canada would decide. Actually in 1914 events and emotion decided, and Canada was fully committed to the war, even to the extent of gravely impairing its national unity in order to impose conscription (the draft) in 1917.

Thus for two and a half years North America saw the spectacle of Canada at war and the United States at peace. Clearly Canadian participation was considered no immediate business of the United States. Yet that participation could have been, as the events of 1940 were to reveal, of great importance, even danger, to the United States. What had been the military relations of the two countries since 1815?

It seems fair to say that the United States from 1775, when congressional armies invaded the province of Quebec, would have welcomed the inclusion of the British Canadian colonies into the Union, for which indeed the Articles of Confederation provided. It was not Canadian territory that was desired, but possession of Canada would have given complete control of the fisheries and the fur trade. Even more important, it would have removed the military menace from the north, first French and then British, and it would have deprived the Indian tribes of the old Northwest of support and a refuge.

The British, for reasons never fully stated, thought it worthwhile in 1775-83 and in 1812-14 to preserve Canada, perhaps for prestige, certainly as a loyalist refuge, and after 1815 as a timber reserve for the Royal Navy. But it had to convince the United States that Canada would not be a military menace, and the disarmament of the Great Lakes was the symbol of this. Yet war threatened three times: in the aftermath of the Canadian rebellions (1837-38), in the Oregon affair (1844-46), and the Trent incident (1861-62). As long as British troops garrisoned Canada and the boundaries between Canada and the United States were not fully settled, war was not unthinkable. It really became so when by the Treaty of Washington of 1871 outstanding difficulties were settled, including the San Juan Island border dispute. At the same time, and in the same spirit, the British troops were withdrawn from Quebec, as they already had been from Montreal and farther inland. Only the garrison at Halifax was left, and it was the garrison of a naval base, not of a border. The defense of Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific was left to the Canadian militia, not by training or armament a military menace to anyone except disturbers of the peace.

In effect, as may now be seen, warfare between Canada and the United States was most unlikely and could be ruled out of serious consideration. This is the justification for the generation of American and Canadian oratory about the “undefended border.” In fact, there were repeated thoughts on the unthinkable subject—in the Venezuelan crisis (1895-96), during the Alaskan boundary dispute (1898-1903), and in the thinking of some Canadian military men down to 1914 and even, mirabile dictu, in the 1920’s. This last was unrepresentative but reflected the engrained fears of the weaker power and the continued possibility, as it seemed, of a British and American conflict down to the Washington agreement on naval disarmament in 1921-22.

None of this thinking became policy. Canada turned rather to legal-diplomatic relations with Washington and finally assumed in 1927 the burden and delicacies of direct diplomatic representation. Such relations did not of themselves preclude military action, but the spirit in which they were conducted did. The border, long in fact defended, became actually as undefended as it had become undefendable.

Military conflict between Canada and the United States had then become impossible. The events of the 1930’s and the Second World War, however, made military cooperation necessary. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had pledged this in his speech at Kingston, Ontario, in 1938. With the distinct possibility of German domination of Europe after May 1940, the two countries had to take common action for the defense of North America. British naval officers were surveying Sept Isles in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as a possible base for the Royal Navy. Canada might have become, in Britain’s place, the country from which resistance to the Nazis would be continued. Against this background the Permanent Joint Defense Board was created for the exchange of ideas on North American defense. It was a rather strange instrument, more symbolic perhaps than useful, and in any case American entry into a vastly expanded war in 1941 overshadowed it. It did, however, mark the continuing commitment of the two countries to continental defense and reflected the fact that henceforth Canada shared the protection of American naval and military power and must seek its armaments from American industry and condition its military policy by the fundamental need for joint action with the United States in defense of North America.

Neither the further course of the war nor events afterward, including the Korean War, altered this fact. What did alter it was the new threat of intercontinental bombing, first by planes and then by missiles, with nuclear weapons. Out of this need came the building of the early-warning lines in Canada, as well as Alaska, and in 1958 the agreement for organization of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). More desired in Canada by the military than by the politicians, NORAD was an inescapable necessity, for only by continuous cooperation, daily joint action, and the most intimate sharing of tactical and strategical thought in the strange new world of radar, computers, and missiles, of overkill and second strike, could there be any effective cooperation.

The difficulties that caused the civilian doubts are obvious. How could there be any real national sovereignty when integration had to be so close and action so sudden? How could there be civilian control? (Canada, unlike the States, has no effective civilian commander in chief, the cabinet playing that role.) How could a country so committed to joint action with another country appear before the world with a policy and a character of its own?

Military necessity in the second half of the twentieth century had thus committed Canada to a military obligation in which it was much the weaker ally. But economic necessity required that it propose policies often at variance with those of the United States. So, often, did the sentiments of its public. So did the general character of its diplomacy, its foreign policy in the narrower sense.

Canadian external policy (so called because so much of it is with the British, who are not foreigners, and Americans, whom Canadians do not think of as foreigners) has always, for the general reasons given earlier, had to operate in a complex of political, legal, and sentimental atmospheres more intricate than is usual. The chief elements in this complex were, of course, Canada’s relations with the British Empire. By 1871 Canada had become fully self-governing and self-defending except in foreign relations and constitutional amendment and in the event of a major war. Efforts after 1885 to have Canada committed by British foreign policy to military action in Britain’s wars when needed were, however, steadily resisted. This resistance was based on the constitutional fact that the Canadian Parliament controlled all taxation in Canada and the Canadian militia, and not a dollar could be raised for war or a man enlisted without its consent. Behind the constitutional objection was the fact that important elements of the Canadian electorate, notably the French Canadians and Irish Catholics but also many others, were no admirers of British imperialism and could see no reason whatever why Canada should take part in Britain’s imperial wars. Canadian governments of both parties therefore insisted that they could undertake no commitments beforehand and that Parliament alone could decide what, if any, action Canada would take on the Empire going to war. This would be as true of a general war in which Britain itself was threatened as of a local colonial war. Canadian nationalism therefore led to the practice of a Canadian isolationism. How politically dangerous any departure from this policy was, was shown when Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s candidate suffered defeat in a by-election in Quebec in which his Nationalist opponent attacked, as a measure leading to conscription, Laurier’s Naval Act creating a Canadian navy to cooperate with the Royal Navy in time of war.

A national policy, then, justified in the last analysis on the absorption of Canada’s energies in peopling and governing half a continent, was Canada’s reaction to its membership in the British Empire. Towards the United States its policy had been since Confederation to play the part of the “good neighbor,” a phrase launched by the Canadian statesman George Brown in 1874. Brown, significantly enough, used the term while attempting to persuade the United States to turn again to the policy of reciprocity in tariffs, which Canada had valued so highly in the period of its operation from 1855 to 1866. That is, Canada wanted to develop a continental relationship with the nation with which it shared the continent along a boundary that united rather than divided. It sought to do this in all ways that left its national character distinct; indeed, there were Canadians, particularly in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, who were prepared to risk some blurring of the distinction in what was called “commercial union”.

As not infrequently happens, Canadians discovered then that in fact the United States had accepted the existence of Canada as a nation but was not prepared automatically to welcome any Canadian suggestion for closer relations short of union. Canadian overtures for reciprocity were steadily rejected from 1874 to 1910 because certain American interests feared they would be harmed.

The ready assumption of American friendship was still further shaken by the outcome of the Alaskan boundary dispute (1898-1903). The Canadian case was extremely weak in law, but Canadian desire for a corridor through the Alaskan panhandle to the Yukon goldfields was very strong. They hoped, with British assistance and some American good nature, at least to arrive at a deal that would give Canada the minimum of what it wanted, a sea corridor through the panhandle. But the American government chose to stand on its really unchallengeable legal grounds, and the British had in fact nothing with which to bargain. By the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 Britain had surrendered interest in the Panama Canal. The form of judicial award adopted was merely an attempt to let Canada down easily, but national anger drove Canadians to two conclusions: one was that it must get control of its foreign policy away from Britain; the other was that the Americans are hard bargainers even with their friends. Three consequences followed: The first was the establishment of the Department of External Affairs in 1909, a very modest beginning in fact. The second was the establishment of the Permanent Joint Committee on Boundary Waters in 1910, an attempt to ensure that most disputes with the United States might be handled legally and judicially rather than diplomatically with power taking precedence over law. The third was the rejection by Canada in 1911, when the United States had reversed its stand of half a century, of an agreement for reciprocity in raw materials and some manufactured goods. Canadian nationalism was operating both within the Empire and in North America.

The outbreak of the First World War seemed indeed to contradict this growing nationalism. When Great Britain declared war, its act put Canada also at war, and the Canadian Parliament, backed by a united public opinion, quickly voted for full participation. But the length and ferocity of the war did cause division between French and English Canadians, and the imposition of conscription created a soreness in Anglo-French relations that was to color Canadian politics for the next two decades. Moreover, the experience of military and diplomatic cooperation in war caused national sentiment to grow more quickly than before. By the end of the war the British Empire was well on its way to dissolution into the Commonwealth. In the League of Nations Canadians found an alternative way of asserting their nationhood and of participating in world affairs free of imperial apron strings. The declaration of the national autonomy of the Dominion of Canada in the Commonwealth in 1926, the opening of Canadian embassies in Washington, Paris, and Tokyo in 1927-28, and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 saw the formal recognition of national autonomy in the members of the Commonwealth. Actually, their assumption of the functions of independence, even through participation in the League of Nations, was almost wholly negative. Canada’s opinion and policy in the 1920’s were persistently and self-righteously isolationist, and in the 1930’s its Liberal government after 1935 was to pursue the policy of appeasement of Germany and Italy even further than Neville Chamberlain cared to do.

The Second World War was for Canada a rerun of the First, not in the nature of its participation—that materially was greater even than in 1914-18—but in the sense that it gave Canada a chance to amend the errors of 1918-19 and the postwar period. Canadian nationhood had been established. The country had therefore no purpose but to do what it might to prevent a recurrence of such a world contest. Its one particular interest was unobtrusive, and its realization could be sought in general terms: that was not to be caught, as it had been with respect to Greenland and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, between opposite policies of Great Britain and the United States. Canada, that is, needed to find a new general complex in which to operate, in order not to be caught between giants pursuing their own ends.

The proposed United Nations seemed to offer such a framework of policy. Canada therefore earnestly supported the creation of the U.N. and gave its best thought to its development. Indeed, converted by the experience of the war from isolationism and the belief that the sole function proper to an international organization was conciliation, it was particularly eager to give the Security Council of the United Nations peace-keeping powers.

Canada defined its role in a world in which the United Nations might be effective as that of a middle power, prepared to play a “functional” role in international bodies. That is, though of no great military weight, it could play a part in peace-keeping, and its considerable economic power, especially its foreign trade, would enable it to be helpful in the other organs of the U.N.—the economic and social agencies in which it was to function to try to prevent the conditions out of which wars were thought to arise.

Canada found a similar role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That body in fact covered the area of the world of primary interest to Canada, and since it included the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, it seemed especially likely to prevent the sort of conflicts in which Canada was caught between the differences of its associates. So keen was Canada on the development of NATO that it had included in the treaty Article 2 which called for—in vain as it has proved—the development not only of military cooperation but also of economic and social ties.

Matters did not go in the next fifteen years as Canada had wished. Russian vetoes paralyzed the Council of the U.N. The Korean War, in which Canada took part when it was made a U.N. war, further illustrated the fact that if peace-keeping rested with the great powers, peace could only be kept by agreement among them. When the Suez adventure occurred, Canada not only intervened through the Commonwealth to restrain the British but also proposed the idea of a peace-keeping force supplied by the smaller powers. If the great powers could not cooperate, perhaps the small ones might be used to soothe sore spots from which war might spread. Canadian troops in consequence have been stationed in the Gaza Strip since 1956. Others, following the same line of thought and the same procedures, are in Cyprus. Canadian military personnel help maintain the truce between India and Pakistan.

Canada has thus created for itself the role of the trusted, neutral, and disinterested pacifier. However useful and realistic this role mayor may not prove to be, it is one extremely popular with Canadian public opinion. It is a flattering one, and it seems to be useful. Canadian policy is therefore concerned to preserve this character and to develop the peacekeeping capacities of the U.N. whenever and however it may be possible. The present policy of integrating the armed services of Canada is aimed at increasing Canada’s effectiveness as a peace-keeper.

At the same time, the development of intercontinental warfare made it necessary to reconsider Canada’s part in North American defense. This obligation was met, as noted earlier, in NORAD. But as also pointed out, the Canadian military had been more keen for the actual structure of NORAD than had the Canadian public or government. The reason was quite simple. So definite a commitment to North American defense, with and under U.S. leadership, could only bring into question the genuineness of the independence of Canada’s role in world politics. A secondary reason was that Official Canadians at least had not forgotten the readiness with which local American commanders had seemed to treat Canada as an occupied country during the war and the heavy-handed dealing of Cordell Hull with the Saint Pierre-Miquelon affair. The Armed Forces (Visiting) Act of 1947 dealt with the former matter, so far as law could, by insisting on the usual rule that troops of a friendly power must come under the laws of any state in which they are placed. But the second could always recur, given the authority and the preoccupations of the United States.

The difficulties of cooperation were in fact to be illustrated during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The Canadian government delayed taking action when under pressure from the NORAD command and the government of the United States to do so. When thirty-six hours later Canada did place its forces on the alert and open Canadian skies to American planes, the action was belated in terms of intercontinental warfare. There was now no question of Parliament deciding, but the Canadian cabinet had to do it, and the cabinet, a nationally representative body, lacked the unity and decisiveness of a civilian commander in chief. One may suppose the cabinet was divided over the very issue already stated: What was Canada, the “Ready, aye, ready” ally of the United States, or the detached peace-maker?

The issue rolled on and was renewed over the question whether the Bomarc missiles sited in Canada and the Canadian Air Division in Europe should be equipped with nuclear warheads. Again, what was Canada, the military satellite of the United States or an autonomous country pursuing peace? When the leader of the opposition, Lester B. Pearson, proposed that nuclear warheads be adopted, the issue became a political one. When the American Department of State intervened in the debate, to set the record straight, as it alleged, the charge of American intervention in Canadian politics was inevitably made by the government of Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker. His own cabinet split on the issue, and his government was defeated in the House of Commons and in the ensuing election, although the opposition failed to gain a majority. Clearly, Canada was seriously divided between its obligations to North American defense—even its role in NATO—and the role it was attempting to play in the world. No public solution has been attempted by seeking to diminish the obligations or by changing the role. It has been officially announced that Canadian forces in NATO will revert to conventional weapons by stages. It is clearly a matter to be dealt with by careful diplomacy and full understanding, since neither obligations nor role can in fact be changed.

In economic policy, Canadian trade with Cuba in nonstrategic materials and, above all, the sales of wheat to Communist China raised the same issue in other forms. Canada believes, and necessarily, in the widest possible trade, with as little ideological consideration as possible. That in this matter it must differ with American policy and sentiment is perhaps unfortunate; but it must be so, Canada being what it is. The same issue underlies Canada’s caution about joining the Organization of American States. Many of its interests and sentiments lead it to join; but if it did so, would it have to become the subordinate or, worse, the challenger of American policy? Perhaps at the point of joining, it set the matter aside after American action in Santo Domingo.

In summary, then, the fundamental questions of Canadian policy are these:

·  How to meet its North American commitments while retaining independence in fact and in appearance
 

·  How to preserve good relations with the United States while trading as freely as possible
 

·  How to preserve economic independence while continuing to share in American capital, industrial skill, and enterprise
 

·  How to be a good neighbor to the United States without ceasing to be a good citizen of the world.

Peterborough, Ontario

Contributor

Dr. William Lewis Morton (M.A., Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University; LL.D., Toronto University) is Master of Champlain College and Professor of History, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. His teaching career dates from 1935, as a Lecturer in History at St. John’s College, Winnipeg. Three years later he moved to United College, Winnipeg, for a year as Assistant Professor of History and Head of Department. Then he moved to the University of Manitoba, 1939-40; to Brandon College, Brandon, Manitoba, 1940-42; then back to the University of Manitoba, where he remained until 1966, successively as Assistant Professor of History, Associate Professor, Professor of Canadian History, Head of the Department of History, Assistant to the Dean of Arts and Science, Acting Dean of Arts and Science, and Provost, University College. He has served summer appointments at the Universities of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, Michigan, and British Columbia; and in 1960 he was visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Morton is the author of The Canadian Identity (University of Wisconsin Press, 1961) and other books on Canada; his articles have been widely published in professional journals and in encyclopedias.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor