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Mark Norman is a distinguished and courageous officer and the attempt to starve him out of the means of a full defence is scandalous

Canada has always performed with distinction in all its combat roles, and was never involved in military activity that was fundamentally unjust or contravened international law, or undertaken for discreditable motives. And Canada has never been on the losing side of a conflict, although many peacekeeping efforts had ambiguous or suboptimal outcomes. Peacekeeping was steadily emphasized by the Chrétien government as part of its policy of being, like Pierre Trudeau, somewhat anti-American and less enthused about the Western alliance than about masquerading as intercontinental help-mates to universal peace, where military units were lightly equipped and comparatively inexpensive. The whole posture was a method of whittling down our defence capability and devoting every possible resource to domestic transfer payments. In the Pierre Trudeau era, and to some extent those of Chrétien and Mulroney (though he made a valiant effort to maintain the viability of our defence capacity), such payments were a river of money into Quebec to buy votes for federalism.

As a grand strategy, it succeeded, as the separation of Quebec was the greatest threat to the country. And apart from the brief dreamworld of Jimmy Carter, abruptly terminated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan deftly conducted the Western alliance to complete and almost bloodless victory in the Cold War, while the contemporary Canadian leaders, not without difficulty, defeated the Quebec separatists. Chrétien and Harper were fiscally responsible, and Harper became an assertive foreign policy leader, excoriating the Russians and aligning Canada very clearly with Israel. But neither of them ever saw the quality of technical defence procurement as stimulative fiscal spending, nor the value of increased military personnel for opening up opportunities for the unemployed, or for adult education. Much less did Harper grasp that for his tough-talking foreign policy to enjoy any credibility, it had to be backed with a level of military strength that gave Canada a little leverage among our allies, in practice, with the United States, and to a degree, the U.K. and France. Harper and his government seemed to be grasping the possibilities when they announced the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy in 2010. This was not only a plan to rebuild the navy, which had withered to essentially a coastal force, but also to endow the country with a vibrant shipbuilding industry, as it had had intermittently since Jean Talon in New France, with knock-on benefits through a broad range of industrial sectors.