The Harper Shift is a month-long look at how Canada has changed over a decade of Conservative government — and at what kind of country we want to become. Here Eugene Lang considers a decade of war.

The Harper years have been war years for Canada. Over the past decade, the Canadian Armed Forces have had their most active period in living memory, battling insurgencies and civil wars in both southwest Asia and the Middle East. How, if at all, has this changed Canada?

Stephen Harper’s tenure began inauspiciously with the inheritance of Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan from previous Liberal governments. Yet he quickly made the Afghanistan cause his own, embracing the conflict and twice extending Canada’s mission in Kandahar province, even as the casualties mounted. Not one for “cutting and running,” Harper kept Canadian forces fighting in Afghanistan for the first six years of his tenure.

By 2011 Canada’s military found themselves fighting again in the Libyan air campaign, a multinational effort to prevent the remnants of the Gadhafi regime from killing innocent civilians. Alongside our closest allies, Canada played an important role in establishing a no-fly zone and bombing Gadhafi’s forces on the ground.

Today, Canada is on the front lines in the battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS), with fighter and surveillance aircraft in theatre as part of a coalition to help local forces defeat ISIS and prevent it from establishing a caliphate with medieval values and practices.

It is tempting to conclude, therefore, that Harper has been more enthusiastic than his predecessors in using the military instrument of foreign policy, and that another prime minister would have made much different choices. In other words, that Harper is a warmonger, as some have implied. That conclusion is unfair.

The opposition Liberals supported the Afghanistan missions. The Libyan air campaign found favour in both Liberal and NDP ranks. And while these parties oppose Canada’s military involvement in Iraq and Syria today, it is not hard to imagine either one taking a different position were they the government. The international pressure for Canada to join a coalition of our major allies aimed at a barbaric group that overtly threatens to kill citizens of western liberal democracies, including Canadians, would be hard for any prime minister to resist.

That said, there are two novelties in Harper’s approach to issues of war and peace.

First, the language used by this government, especially with respect to Afghanistan, broke with tradition and decorum. Implying, as the PM and his ministers did, that those who oppose the Conservatives’ policy on Afghanistan are unsupportive of the Canadian Armed Forces, or even unpatriotic, was unprecedented, over the top, if not beyond the pale.

Second, the diplomatic instrument of Canada’s international peace and security policy has atrophied in the Harper years. Our diplomats are not on the global stage today putting forward constructive and imaginative ideas on conflict prevention and resolution, working in the best tradition of Canada as a trusted mediator, and brandishing the diplomatic demeanour that is part of the Canadian character.

Other prime ministers were just as willing as Harper to utilize the military as an instrument of foreign policy — Jean Chrétien’s governments, for example, sent the Canadian Forces into conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. But previous governments were equally active on the international diplomatic front. Diplomacy has been glaringly absent in the Harper years, such that all of this government’s big decisions on international security appear to be choices to fight rather than help resolve conflicts.

The Harper approach to international peace and security has produced two broad shifts in Canada, both of which are likely to survive a change of government in Ottawa.

First, the heavy and visible burden that Canada’s military assumed over the last 10 years has re-established it as one of our most respected institutions. That is a good thing. Canadians don’t have to venerate their military, but they should respect the institution and those who serve in it.

Second, Canada’s peacekeeping myth, forged at Suez and sustained for five decades thereafter, is waning. A Cold War idea, peacekeeping was kept alive in the post Cold War period by successive governments, even as Canada engaged in more wars and few blue beret operations. Our political leaders clung to the popular myth even as their actions belied it.

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The Harper government, by contrast — skeptical if not hostile toward the United Nations generally — has abandoned all pretense of Canada as UN peacekeeper.

The wars Harper has chosen to fight, and the language his government has used to build support for them, have exposed Canadians to a more Hobbesian world and a correspondingly different role for Canada in the world. Canadians have lost some of their innocence during the Harper years.

Eugene Lang, Adjunct Professor, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University is co-author (with Janice Stein) of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. He was chief of staff to two Liberal ministers of National Defence.

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