Days into a Trump administration that looks more chaotic by the minute, it’s becoming even more clear that the Canadian cabinet shuffle of January 3 was conducted almost entirely in response to President Trump — while also reflecting a broader plan to reactivate elder statesmen in Canada-U.S. relations of the stature of Brian Mulroney and Derek Burney.

It’s now also clear that one of the quiet winners in the shuffle was a man who stayed put: Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan. The abrupt suspension of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman from his duties as vice-chief of defence staff less than a week later — for reasons the government has not yet made clear — tended to obscure the fact. But the first hard evidence of it came the day after Inuguration Day, when Sajjan and new Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland made it clear that plans for an African peacekeeping mission are on hold while the feds focus on higher priorities — like shoring up NATO, or whatever Trump leaves of it.

Sajjan did his African due diligence last summer, and in the course of that managed to score a policy win by publicly pointing out that the term “peacekeeping” is no longer appropriate for situations where the use of military force (that’s combat, by the way) might be necessary for stabilizing a conflict.

Maybe that looked like a quibble, but it amounted to a major symbolic victory in a capital that is violently allergic to any suggestion of military risk, and in a governing party that has a deeply ingrained horror of even the appearance of force — to the extent that the Battle of the Medak Pocket in 1993 was made to ‘disappear’ for some years.

The Somalia incident that led to the disbanding of the Airborne Regiment had happened the year before Medak. The Rwandan genocide followed the next year, and then a very short-lived misadventure in the Congo in 1997. The suspension of the Trudeau government’s peacekeeping plans will cause consternation in capitals like Paris and The Hague, which were looking to Canada for urgent help in Mali. But it will fill the Canadian Armed Forces with nothing but a sense of relief. To this day, senior officers shudder at any mention of African commitments.

Practically since the beginning of 2016, there had been rumours circulating in the small, tight Canadian defence community that neither Sajjan nor Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance would keep their jobs for long. Those rumours spoke of palpable tension over the direction of foreign military commitments within the Trudeau government, usually attributed to differences in opinion between an unworldly Stéphane Dion and the more experienced and realistic Sajjan.

With Dion’s departure, and the ascent of a more hard-headed foreign minister in the person of Freeland, it seems possible that the two professional soldiers who head Canada’s military will have an easier time being heard in the Langevin Block. With Dion’s departure, and the ascent of a more hard-headed foreign minister in the person of Freeland, it seems possible that the two professional soldiers who head Canada’s military will have an easier time being heard in the Langevin Block.

Those rumours were fuelled by several factors. One was the considerable delay in pulling Canada’s fighter jets out of the Iraq/Syria mission. Another was the government’s obvious eagerness to insert itself into a major peacekeeping role — partly to win back a UN Security Council seat and partly as a visible demonstration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy slogan, ‘Canada is back’ (whatever that means — it’s hardly original).

The rumours caught fire after Dion’s feckless cri de coeur at last July’s Warsaw NATO summit, when he expressed regrets over the fact that sending Canadian troops to Latvia might make them unavailable for peacekeeping duties elsewhere. Intentionally or not, Dion sent a signal that Canada might be less than fully committed to NATO — specifically to the nervous countries between its eastern flank and Russia. That was partially offset by Trudeau’s subsequent visit to Ukraine — but the visit did not include an announcement of an increase in military assistance to Ukraine, which is set to expire in March 2017. A decision on the mission’s extension is pending and the Ukrainian ambassador is becoming noticeably uneasy.

If the U.S. throws NATO under the bus, sending more Canadians soldiers to Eastern Europe would be an act of folly not far short of sending Canadians to Hong Kong in 1941 — and everyone in the military profession knows it. And yet, we have to support our allies, Trump or no Trump.

Sajjan also managed to successfully reshape the Iraq/Syria ground engagement into an augmented Special Forces commitment that has been doing good work with Kurdish forces in front of Mosul while avoiding serious (i.e., politically troubling) incidents. That’s no trifle: To have been engaged in any kind of military operation in that war zone for as long as we have while suffering only one casualty is an enviable professional accomplishment.

With Dion’s departure, and the ascent of a more hard-headed foreign minister in the person of Freeland, it seems possible that the two professional soldiers who head Canada’s military will have an easier time being heard in the Langevin Block. (A caveat: The Norman affair, which seems to be a matter of service discipline and an unwelcome distraction at an unfortunate time, needs to be addressed clearly and quickly to keep the political decks clear.)

Leaving aside the (hopefully) loopier scenarios presented by a Trump presidency, the sour notes for the Armed Forces remain procurement and force strength. The recent news that it might take ten years to replace the Second World War-era sidearms currently used by the Forces is another page in the encyclopedic account of Canada’s defence procurement malaise.

Given this government’s existing fiscal commitments, and concomitant projected deficits, there isn’t likely to be the political will or the money for major procurements for many years to come — unless some new non-negotiable demands arrive from the South.

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